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The future of video games is always an interesting debate to have; the industry is one of the fastest evolving environments in the world today and it's almost impossible to predict where we might be ten or twenty years from now. Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot has one idea on the matter, though, and it's quite the suggestion.

His comments come from an interview with Variety, where he talks about his belief that the next generation of home consoles will be the last. He believes that the recent pattern of hardware updates that the industry is used to will soon be replaced by higher quality, multi-device streaming services.

"I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware. With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us."

Of course, streaming has started to have a much stronger presence in other mediums; the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime have become the go-to film services for many users now, and it might not be too much of a shock to see games take a similar path, especially with the popularity of game-streaming site Twitch. Guillemot believes this potential evolution will be a good thing for the gaming world, more so than future hardware updates.

"It is going to help the AAA game industry grow much faster. We have to work on the accessibility of those games, to make sure they can be played on any device, but the fact that we will be able to stream those games on mobile phones and television screens without a console is going to change a lot of the industry."

There are no real expectations to see new hardware arrive at this year's E3 from any of the major console makers, so we'll likely have to wait a few more years before understanding where the next stage of gaming will be for certain. 

Do you think streaming will become the norm for video games, rather than dedicated consoles, or do you think we'll still be buying the latest Nintendo hardware twenty or thirty years from now? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

[source gamesindustry.biz, via variety.com]