A couple years ago at the E3 videogame convention in Los Angeles, Phil Harrison, then the president of worldwide studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, told me he'd be surprised if the Playstation 4 has a physical disc drive. Considering that Sony had just made such a huge bet on the Blu-ray drive in the PS3, it was a provocative bit of soothsaying. But Harrison was really just articulating the industry's forgone conclusion: that game systems as we know them are at the end of their life cycle.
Now, That Videogame Blog brings us an amen from Sandy Duncan, the former Microsoft executive who headed up the Xbox business in Europe. Duncan suggests that consoles will be gone in due time. "In 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV," he says, "most of this stuff will be 'virtualized' as web services by your content provider."
