12/21/08

The next generation of the gaming market.

I just typed this up for another quadrant of the internet, but it's something I've repeated so often that I thought I'd put it down somewhere official. Then in a few years I can look back and talk of how sagely or ignorant I was.

PCs are a difficult market because you can steal games. Consoles are a difficult market because you can resell games, thus limiting creators to one profit per hard copy when said hard copy changes hands five times. This often equates to a $50 sale and several $45 sales by GameStop, with creators only touching that initial $50. I think the future of gaming will be an evolution of the "Online Console Marketplace," where games are downloaded over proprietary hardware (consoles instead of PCs.) This gives extensive security against game stealing, and also eliminates the reselling dilemma. Furthermore, with proliferation of broadband (and if Obama does his rural broadband infrastructure thing, even more so) and hard drive space being a joke these days, the tech limitations that neutered this business model in the past are no longer concerns.
The only other part of this to address is the transference of interface. Many people (myself included) find a keyboard and mouse the ideal interface; a keyboard provides a multitude of keys and a typing interface to aid communication, while a mouse alone can provide as many buttons as an entire console controller. Furthermore, console joysticks can't provide the precision movements of a mouse. However, I think it's easy to get over this simply by providing more support for keyboards and mouses for console gaming, even packaging consoles with this option. One thing that Guitar Hero has shown us is that people don't mind maneuvering large piles of hardware to get a good gaming experience.

Anyway, that's my oft-repeated position on the future of gaming.

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