Sandy Duncan, the former head-of-business for Microsoft Europe, has a bold statement: consoles have five to ten years before they’re an ancient business model. He pins most of the blame on evolving technology, but its implications are interesting:
“[Look] at how quickly Popcap or Oberon are growing, or look at what has happened to World of Warcraft in the last 3 to 4 years as so many more homes have easy access to decent broadband services. Maybe you’ll see YoYo Games competing with EA in 5 years… [and] why not ?”
Casual gaming’s behemoths given a chance to usurp console gaming’s Nazi Germany? May seem absurd, but Wikipedia’s article on the Game Crash of 1983 presents a similar, actually-did-happen secnario:
[Since console-makers were unable to restrict third-party production of games for their systems], [t]he release of so many new games in 1982 completely flooded the market and most stores did not have, or decided not to allocate, sufficient space to carry all the new games and consoles. Inside Mattel, one Intellivision sales executive explained the problem: “Two years of products have been pushed into the channel in one year, and there’s no way to re-balance the system.” As stores tried to return the surplus games to the new publishers, the publishers had neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers’ money. Many publishers, including Games by Apollo and US Games (the ill-fated Quaker Oats games unit), quickly folded.
Unable to return the unsold games to defunct publishers after Christmas 1982, toy stores marked down the titles and placed them in discount bins and sale tables. Whereas the typical game of 1982 cost US$34.95 — about US$75 in 2007 when adjusted for inflation — the discount bins quickly settled on the price of US$4.95 per game. By June 1983 the market for the more expensive games had shrunk dramatically and was replaced by a new market of rushed, low-budget games. Consumers’ trips to the store often began and ended at the discount bin, the uninformed customer seeing cheaper games as more appealing regardless of quality. After a while however, the consumers began to tire of the substandard quality of the cheaper games, and rather than pay the high prices for the dwindling number of high-budget, quality games, they quit gaming entirely.
Budget games have destroyed interest in the quality product once before. It’s happening again for PC gaming, where Epic’s Tim Sweeney argued the little guys got help from those at the top:
The industry, he says, has changed dramatically over the last decade, and that the constant advancements in technology have given game creators an excuse to cater specifically to the tiny portion of PC gamers who own high-end systems.
This shift leaves all those with lower specifications -- what Sweeney calls the "mainstream PC" -- out in the cold with computers much better suited for "Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever," and as a result, that becomes those computers' sole function.
As of today, Civilization: Revolution isn’t slated for a PC release, but it will be on the Nintendo DS! I’m not trying to be the bearer of the gaming apocalypse, but budget games have already found a way to compete with the pay-to-play PC product. With console gaming the only ship above water, what happens if they can compete with the X-Box and Playstation 3?
Don’t say it can’t happen.
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