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The strangest announcement of Nintendo yesterday was not on the Nintendo Direct broadcast in the West. This happened on the Japanese Nintendo Direct stream when the company revealed it. Assassin's Creed Odyssey will be playable on the console when it will be released on October 5 – thanks to streaming.
This cloud version of the game will only be available in Japan, but it raises a number of interesting questions about the future of video game streaming and its potential to make less powerful games such as the Switch. While Sony is pursuing a streaming game service similar to Netflix with its PlayStation Now, and that Microsoft is currently working on its own similar service over the next three years, it turns out that companies working with Nintendo have also experimented but perhaps in a less direct way.
In May of this year, Capcom unveiled a cloud version of Resident Evil 7 for Switch in Japan for which he has been associated with the Taiwanese Ubitus GameCloud streaming game company. At a cost of about $ 20, players could rent the game and broadcast it for 180 days. All Japanese players had to download and install a 45 MB client, and then broadcast the full game. The IGN office in Japan tested it and said the game worked surprisingly well with low latency, even on WiFi.
According to a report from the Wall Street newspaper in June, the cloud version of the game did not require much production resources, and Capcom was looking to make its games more accessible. At the time, a spokesman for the company told the newspaper that the company could offer more of its games in this form in the future if Resident Evil 7 Well done.
Before that, Nintendo had let two other companies play games on its hardware in Japan. In April, Sega released Phantasy Star Online 2: Cloud on Switch where players can still access their user data from other versions of the game on PS4 and Vita. Several years earlier in 2014, Square Enix released a version of Dragon Quest X, the MMO incarnation of the series, for the 3DS that used cloud streaming to make the game playable, something it had also done to bring the game on smartphones the previous year.
Nintendo has often proven to be a cautious company that avoids diving into new technologies. It's no wonder that integrating cloud-based games into software and hardware is so slow or allowing individual publishers to take the lead. "Although we can not go into the details of the arrangement, Nintendo is excited about the partnership with Ubisoft," said a spokesman for Nintendo. Kotaku when asked how Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Cloud Version has come to. "Developers and publishers are free to explore options like cloud computing when they decide how best to bring their games to Nintendo Switch."
It makes sense that Ubisoft is the next company to offer Nintendo on this offer. "We will see more triple games on a wider variety of screens, it's a huge trend that will continue to change the industry, and we're also seeing increasing continuity across platforms," said Yves Guillemot of Ubisoft . Kotaku contributor Keza MacDonald earlier this summer. For this reason, he thinks that the next generation of console hardware will be the last.
In addition to being optimistic about the future of video game streaming, Ubisoft has also fostered an increasingly close relationship with Nintendo in recent years, as evidenced by the Mario + the battle of the kingdom of rabbits crossover and the fact that Fox McCloud and co. of Star Fox fSoul will appear in the Switch version of Ubisoft's toy-to-life space shooter, Starlink: Battle for Atlaswhen he leaves in October.
Asked about plans to expand its library of games broadcast outside the country, Nintendo has Kotaku to the respective publishers. Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why its cloud-based porting Assassin's Creed Odyssey currently only comes in Japan, no more than Capcom, about Resident Evil 7. However, it seems clear that more and more cases of tests like these are coming to North America. and elsewhere.
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