Veronica Belmont and Jonathan Blow on the Future of Gaming

Today on a star-studded Game Life it's Belmont and Blow.

Sounds like a buddy cop movie.

It's exactly like a buddy cop movie.

(upbeat music)

We are joined of course by

Jonathan Blow and Veronica Belmont.

Yes, thank you both for being here.

Of course.

Jonathan Blow, creator of videogames

such as Braid and the upcoming The Witness.

Your new game is going to be on the Playstation 4,

but it's also going to be on you know the iPad

so that people don't necessarily have to get

a console if they want to get that experience.

And PC as well.

And PC as well?

Yeah you know after those come out

we'll sort of look around and see

what other platforms even exist at that point.

Like you know a year from now, I don't even know

what's gonna exist.

Is Apple gonna build a television that is

kind of fast at running games and stuff, right?

Veronica, as a technology journalist,

somebody who's concentrating a little bit more

on the gadget space these days, what do you think?

Everything that I've kind of heard about going forward

all seems to be largely cloud-based.

And that then goes to those same kinds of problems

the always on issues, you know

the broadband connectivity issues.

Even bandwidth cap issues, which I think

you know we haven't really brought up yet.

Right. True, yeah.

That's gonna be a big, if you have a Playstation 4

and you're downloading the bulk of your games,

how is that going to work if you have

a 500 megabyte bandwidth cap?

I mean even yeah, and the vagaries

of broadband too throughout the country.

You know that really, the play experience is gonna be

or at least the user experience is gonna be pretty affected.

But Apple is interesting because I mean

they already, they're already largely in the gaming space

in a lot of ways.

If they do actually come out with a connected TV

that is built by Apple that works on their ecosystem alone

you know, how many people would buy The Witness

for that as opposed to buying it

on a Playstation at that point?

If they can then have it in a largescreen format

and also portable on their devices.

Right, if it's cross play between all of their devices.

Independent of adoption of the PS4, do you

see iOS and the PC versions as almost backstops to this?

Well I mean any of these systems

could be very successful, right?

So you know we, we went toward Playstation 4

on the console side because it feels to me

like they could be very successful.

But also just I want a lot of people

to be able to play the game.

We've been talking here on the brand new

video podcast for Game Life to Jon Blow

and to Veronica Belmont.

Guys, thank you both very much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

We really appreciate it.

(upbeat music)

Hey guys if you have opinions

about consoles being always online

or about indie developers in the age of

Playstation 4 and iOS, leave 'em

right there in the comments.

Or what's the next platform for

The Witness to be developed for?

There we go, yes.

I think that watch that you have there,

that's totally gonna run it.

Oh the Pebble version of The Witness.

Yep, it's coming, exclusive.

Q1 2014, guaranteed by Jonathan Blow right here.