Where Does the Future of Video Gaming Lie?
Modern-day video gaming is currently in the throes of a number of very interesting revolutions. Within the past month the gaming world has born witness to both the official unveiling of Sony’s new mobile gaming device, tentatively titled the NGP but more colloquially known as the PSP2, as well as the unveiling of the North American release date and pricing for the 3DS, Nintendo’s mobile, glasses-free 3D gaming platform.
Both systems are very, very different animals. Sony is first and foremost a hardware developer, and as such is putting some tech into the PSP2 which could only be considered “beastly”. It’s reportedly able to play games of a graphical quality comparable to the Playstation 3, which if one stops and thinks about the implications of that is absolutely crazy.
It looks…expensive
The 3DS however stands on the complete other side of the spectrum; it looks in no way to be a graphical powerhouse, with many games so far shown off at press events looking equivalent to games that came out over a decade ago. What it will have however is that Nintendo “edge”, that push of software and brand familiarity, not to mention innovative new uses for 3D in their games, which will assuredly entice both Nintendo fans as well as the casual gamer.
This example is a symptom of the greater change that has been occurring in video gaming for the past number of years. Starting arguably with Nintendo’s release of the Wii and DS, to thunderous applause (and sales), video gaming has managed to hit the mainstream.
While this can only be considered a good thing for gaming veterans such as myself, it does come with some trepidation. For it seems that with the way current sales trends are going, the real money in video gaming lies not in the next deep, hardcore-gaming blockbuster gamers know and love, but in casual gaming.
Though I’m not so crass as some as to sit on my soapbox and scream that hardcore gaming as we know it is in its death throes, as I certainly believe that there will be games that’ll allow me to shoot and kill strange alien creatures in space for years if not decades to come, these games are no longer seen as the gold-standard of video gaming, at least in the eyes of money-hungry production houses.
Where are they looking, you ask? At Angry Birds. Or, more generally, at games that are cheap and quick to produce, contain little real substance, and sell a mint. The Wii started this trend with awful collections of mini-games being cheap and easy to create and bundle together into a product, and yet still captivating to an audience that had yet to experience motion-gaming. How else can one explain the fact that a game with the title Carnival Games sold a million-and-a-half copies?
This winged misanthrope is worth a bloody fortune!
And now today, with the advent and explosion of smart phones (particularly the iPhone), it’s possible for casual games to be made easily and distributed quickly. This has caused the casual market to explode, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down.
On the other side of the spectrum, however, hardcore gaming is becoming a much dicier prospect for investors. Blockbuster titles now cost multiple millions to create, bringing forth the problem of not only being too expensive a barrier for new and innovative developers to come into the fray, but also making established developers far more hesitant to create new intellectual property. Why create something interesting and new when Halo 4 will make you so much more money?
Which leads us to where we currently stand today, with the video game industry on a precipice. While I currently believe that the age of hardcore gaming isn’t going to die anytime soon, it isn’t too much of a stretch to argue that the future of gaming lies not with the unkempt-bearded, cheeto-dust-fingered hardcore gamer’s favourite 70-hour long roleplaying game, but in that 99 cent app on his iPhone.
But who knows, in all likelihood video games will end up swerving off in some direction no one could possibly predict. Where do you think the future of gaming lies?
