GDCA lifetime achievement award recipient predicts 'increasing stratification'
Warren Spector, creator of Deus Ex and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award at this years Game Developer Choice Awards, says that consoles are here to stay, despite increasing competition from the mobile gaming sector.
"I don't know that console gaming will ever go away," Spector told GamesIndustry Intenational (formerly gamesindustry.biz).
"I think it's going to become more - god I said I would never get into the business of prediction, but here I go - I think what you're going to see is an increasing sort of stratification, where you see fewer, much higher end games that continue to do exceptionally well on the console."
Spector says that as the cost of making competitive console games gets higher, there will be fewer publishers and developers who can afford to take the risks.
"That's going to leave a lot of people behind. It's a lot like when, frankly, the first CDs came around and everybody at Origin [Systems] was looking at this silver disk going 'oh my god, what happens when people with more money than we have start filling that thing with assets?' Well now, I mean, once you start actually doing Pixar quality interactive entertainment, there aren't going to be a lot of companies who can afford to do that."
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Spector believes it is important for developers to realize they are becoming part of an ecosystem not ruled by any one platform, but must remain flexible.
He may be considering making a game for iOS or other mobile platform himself.
"I think a lot about 'how do I bring that idea that playstyle matters and choice and consequence gaming, character-driven story stuff, to that little iPhone or the little Android device?' No one has really done that, and so for me personally, I'm looking at that as an opportunity and hoping I get a chance to do it."
No Spector, just...no. It's over for consoles.
Inside 2 years, the iPad has sold 55m units. Gone from 1ghz/dual graphics to 1ghz dual/quad graphics. 1024x768 resolution to 2048x1536.
The next consoles will probably be the last.
nonsense, there is still room for consoles but they will be much more like the current set top box. Why would Ipads replace them even if the resolution was there the GPU power isn't and even if the GPU power was there the input isn't there (touch is a bad interface) and most of us still want to sit on a sofa with a big screen.
Would you say people don't want Bluray players as they will watch all their films on the Ipad?
@Kurt Munro : I think you're forgetting, the Ipad isn't a gaming device 1st then everything else tagged on, its a tablet device, gaming is part of it but it hasn't sold over 55m units for the gaming aspects, business's use it to replace paper, hospitals use it for medical reasons, schools use it for educational reasons. I would never buy a 10" tablet to play games over a 40" TV that I can play with friends.
People seem to not know why the new ipad has the resolution it does, to make the graphics smoother without merging pixels and making them look funny it had to be at least 2x the current res, not to just show off about having a super high res screen (well it is with apple but its more for just keeping things drawn on the screen in proportion.) It's also doubtful that games will be much better in terms of graphics because the GPU is now powering 4X the amount of pixels
It's so difficult to gauge at the moment, although the iPad is not primarily a gaming device it is very much an entertainment device (designed for the sole purpose of distracting consumers). Please don't mistake that as a dig at entertainment, some could argue life is a distraction.
But let's not forget that in the console market there are different types of gamers, core gamers who game to game, to challenge the world, to win, to compete to game. And then you have the casual gamers who come to kill time, to take them away from their boring and tiresome moments. Further some come to feed their addiction, but nonetheless when we look from an entertainment perspective the iDevices are taking up a fair amount of mind share.
The biggest threat at the moment are the open portable devices, if they catch on and have a strong enough portal with some real standards that are adhered to by a majority of manufacturers (or builders) then console gaming might evolve to push out the big three from their dominant position.
But as a developer I quite like these proprietary API's, they change slowly, they are supported by millions of devices and I know what hardware my customers are using. But back to my point, I think open platforms and devices like the Raspberry Pi (with a Screen) could do far more damage - yet still keeps consoles going.
