Higher Speed Internet Will Surely Kill the Traditional Video Game Console [as console prices rise and rise again] 🛜🎮

Will widely available high speed internet kill the traditional video game console?

With the PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series consoles recently being subject to price increases across many territories it got me thinking about how these price increases coupled with tariffs and other market factors are potentially the perfect storm that could see traditional console boxes die and the rise of the streaming cloud services that have traditionally faltered.

It feels so weird that 5 years after the release of the current gen of Xbox and PlayStation consoles that instead of a price drop we are seeing a price increase on a purchase that generally loses money over time. Maybe I should have bought 10 PS5s and sat on them as an asset! 😂

With less "Triple A" games being released due to the longevity of development cycles for modern video games this potentially means that cutting edge high performance boxes are less important as many of the most popular games are low power games that can be played on anything.

One of the long standing issues that face many gamers though is that internet at the moment can be hit and miss depending on where you are in the world. I'm in the UK and our internet is not even in the top 10 in the world which really surprised me when I checked online.

USA internet vs UK Internet - Interestingly the top 10 league table of internet speeds does not include the UK (source WikiPedia) and the UK comes in at number 42!

5G could have been a game changer for UK internet but the investment doesn't seem to have been there in the long run to give us reliable and fast internet at home.

Here’s a ranking of countries by average fixed broadband speeds based on recent data:

Rank	Country	Average Download Speed (Mbps)
1	Singapore	336.45
2	United Arab Emirates	310.05
3	Hong Kong	305.71
4	France	287.44
5	Iceland	281.95
6	Chile	276.77
7	United States	274.16
8	Denmark	247.62
9	Spain	245.58
10	Switzerland	242.32

I have used Xbox Cloud Gaming to play a lot of Starfield on its release in 2024 and it was good at some times and not so good at other times as my speed was variable and depended upon how many people in the house was using the internet. I got around this by playing at night when everyone was in bed.

The other thing to consider is the diminishing returns on NEW GPUs as maybe the need for a new box goes away as we see a genuine plateau on GPU power required to play the latest games.

Fortnite is still one of the most popular video games in the world and you can run it on air fryer. The most popular video game on Steam is a 13 year old video game that has a peak of around 1.5 million players playing it during any 24hr period, that game is Counter Strike 2.

One other thing to consider is that many people no longer buy physical video games and are totally digital. Even Nintendo seem to be embracing a totally digital future with Virtual Carts. With this shift to digital why do you need a physical system when you don't need to slip a disc into it?

Maybe ultimately everything can be a console and all you need is good internet and a controller which makes the barrier to entry across the world slightly lower.

Would you consider going total cloud streaming to play your video games?