Polling the Electorate 3: Gamings Future

[Neon Ignition]

Between the extended lifecycles, changes in buying habits, complaints of second hand sales/piracy, casual gaming, new control methods, the 3D age, graphical advancements slowing, rising development costs, rising hardware prices, social website gaming, cloud based servers and many other 'Future of Gaming' claims it's a somewhat busy and manic time for the industry as it groans under the weight of restructuring its business models and studios crumble under the pressure and situation.

Over the next 10 to 15 years what do you think will be the successes and the failures out of all these directions we as the spending public are being pulled in and what form will the industry take?

[Neon Ignition]

In a nutshell I'd say I see things panning out as:

-Consoles won't change drastically from what they are. They might become less clearly defined as strictly consoles as Sony and Microsoft become more adept at marketing the devices as worthwhile overall entertainment products to non-gamers who want an all in one solution.

-Physical and Digital will become split pretty evenly due to the need for a strong on the street marketing presence and a resistance from the buying public to fully adopt digital methods. Music and Film will have to go 100% digital first and that's not close yet.

-The PC gaming market won't really change much.

-For the digital market, small devs and Indie's will find themselves further and further pushed out of the market once again as the big companies begin to dominate with their higher polished and more heavily marketed titles.

-Handhelds will still be around with a clearer distinction between the types of games and experiences on them versus mobiles. Mobile gaming sales will hit something of a glass roof as more fleshed out titles would require higher budgets affecting the pricing model which is their biggest strength. It will, however, continue to introduce new gamers to the industry and there will be better standardisation as Apple lose their vice like grip on the market.

-The Big 3 will still be the Big 3.

[charlesr]

Mobile gaming will severely dent handheld profits. Kids these days just want their phone and to be playing the twitter/facebook status update game. Social skills will be damaged, but interestingly, kids of today will keep in touch with a wider network of friends than we do, albeit via text instead of voice.

Kids will be happy listening to low quality mp3 tunes/streams (or *shudders* using the youtube jukebox), so CD sales will die. Similarly, films will be watched on mobile phones (some nsfw swearing in link), hitting the DVD/bluray market hard.

Consoles will remain, but to play a game, you'll have to sit through adverts before and during, because the games will be free to avoid piracy but ad subsidised (I'm joking on this one). I can't see all three surviving in their current format. MS and Sony will battle it out till the bitter end, with probably Sony gaming running out of cash first. Nintendo will baffle everyone by treating us to the occassional gem, but otherwise churning out old IP with a new twist.

[k0pp0]

Who cares? we'll all be living on the moon.

[dataDave]

How long into the future are we talking here? 2yrs? 20years? 2 ****ing thousand years? I see all of this happening at some point, even 6 & 7, and 8.

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Sorry, I didn't read.

[dataDave]

How about handhelds killing off mobile phones?

[Sam The Man]

Due to the rising costs of developement and how creating more and more detailed 3d worlds will take longer and longer i believe we will see much more linear and shorter games in the future (look at Final Fantasy XIII) unless developers come up with a special piece of software that can randomly generate towns/cities or world maps (think Minecraft only with the best graphics available in the future) without reducing the quality of design over normal methods.