Ex Epic Games and Gears of War top dog, Cliff Blezinski, has stood up for the recently resigned Adam Orth, who made sarcastic remarks about consumer hate for always-on systems, suggesting that Orth was right, it's something that's going to be increasingly prevalent and we might as well get used to it.
"My gut is telling me that an always online future is probably coming. It's coming fast, and possibly to the majority of the devices you enjoy. Adam's analogies weren't that far off; although the vacuum one was kind of weird. Sim City, with all of its' troubles on launch, seems to be selling briskly."
"Diablo 3, the poster child of a messy launch, is estimated to be at 12 million units. I would bet money that without the always online elements of Diablo 3 that it would have sold half of that."
He then drew a tangent between always-on adoption and Microsoft's decision to make the original Xbox a broadband only console, in the days when broadband adoption wasn't anywhere near the level it is today.
"I'd be willing to say that any early adopter for any new piece of technology is probably going to have some sort of solid internet connection," he said (via CVG). "Also, and I've stated this before, keeping that umbilical cord connected might not always require some sort of insane fat pipe. Sometimes just 3G might be enough."
"Technology doesn't advance by worrying about the edge case," he concluded.
Annoyingly, the man does have a point. The gaming industry does have a history of resisting change. Steam wasn't a popular idea initially and look where we are now. We're living in an increasingly interconnected world and we all spend half our lives on phones or PCs, looking at stuff online.
What do you guys think? Is Cliff making a good point, or speaking a load of gumf?
