Tablet PCs will conquer the market, says Crytek CEO
The next-generation of home consoles will be the last, the CEO of Crytek has claimed.
Speaking to German site Golem, Cevat Yerli said that tablet PCs would conquer the market as the market for hardcore gaming consumers gets “high in the minority”.
He added that he believed that customers are more interested in short burst games, with the quality of console no longer being a key factor for demand.
“The console will displace the PC, you hear it again and again,” said Yerli.
“On the contrary: I suspect that will be the next-generation home console, the last one.
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“Of course there are still hardcore gamers who sit for an hour to install and then play for eight hours. But these consumers are getting high in the minority.”
“Today's gamers buy a game for 99 cents, down load it and play it 15 to 20 minutes per day over a period of two months - and then they go on. Because the market changed, the quality of the console is no longer so much in demand."
Hardcore gamers have always been a minority, and hardcore gamers will always be willing to spend more money for the best hardware to play higher quality games that make use of that power. Tablets opened up a new part of the market that wasn't there before but tablets don't offer a method of input practical to hardcore gaming. Touch screens don't replace gamepads.
When you can connect wireless gamepads to tablets and connect them to your home TV, I think that this is exactly what is going to happen.
No reason to worry though, the high quality games will continue to exist on that platform as well.
Stupid prediction IMO. Consoles will die in a sense but not because people play 99c iPhone apps instead of real games!? 5 minute cheap games are for bus rides or boring conversations. Not comparable.
"Mediumcore" gaming is becoming more & more popular; this is reflected in the types of games that are popular & 99% of commercial games these days being dumbed down for the larger, simpler audience.
Diablo 3 (made simpler for medcore gamers!) just sold 6.5 million copies on launch day...
As consoles advance they become more like PCs only with more interesting input systems & "tend to be attached to bigger screens." Otherwise no difference & this coupled with advent of cloud computing will be the reason for no further *conventional* consoles. But will Nintendo, Sony & MS just stop?
Ofc not. I envision monthly subs to cloud gaming services, and perhaps the "console" will just be a receiver with support for different types of input (motion sense, controller, keyboard etc.) -- or ideally, there would be a universal cloud service & a neutral receiver supporting infrared + Plug 'n' Play input devices, with different games just requiring different input devices (probably licensed to one of Nintento/Sony/MS)!
Food for thought.
It's becoming frequent that I see an article of a developer claiming PC or Console gaming will die to casual or Ipad games. Casual games are made to appeal to anyone who is bored for a few minutes, where any other game is made for gamers who like to play as a hobby.
Gamers aren't moving towards casual. Just because Angry Birds sells well doesn't mean it will eclipse games with more substance.
Consoles just don't make that much sense anymore when you consider how much you are actually paying for outdated hardware. 10 years ago you bought a console because it was rather expensive building a comparable gaming PC, whereas nowadays you buy them solely for exclusive games. It seems that every 3 years or so there's a major breakthrough in GPU's coming from Nvidia and AMD yet the PS3 and Xbox 360 are still stuck with 8 year old technology.
Hardcore gamers are going to become a thing of the past if it is that greater margins can be achieved by pushing relatively polished games through the app stores. Four to five year dev cycles costing countless millions for a limited market makes no sense.
Which is a shame.
As rubbish as most so-called AAA titles are there are still some gems to be had.
I doubt Skyrim would be so mesmerising and immersive on a 10" tablet.
Well, not really, because the industry wants us to have less control over the hardware, which is only really possible if they move more toward the "console" paradigm.
With all the respect, people who buy shortburst games for 0.99 are not gamers, well most of them aren't. There is a lot of profit made there, so that might suggest that idea of tablets and smartphones taking over. Nevertheless if there will be something what will take over the consoles and PC's, it will be something else than tablets.
There are some lengthy games for the iOS, some long adventure games, shooters, and things like Baldur's Gate coming soon to iPad with 80+ hours of context and multiplayer. No one cares it's over ten years old, and it gives a great example of what can be achieved.
