Alex St. John, the CEO of online video game company WildTangent (Sea Life Safari, Blasterball 2 and 3), has predicted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle that consoles will be "extinct" by 2020.He said that "the PS3, the Wii and the X-box are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market."
Before you start bashing him for his observation, it might be good to know why he feels this way. He pointed out that the shareholders of both Microsoft and Sony will no longer be amicable to the huge investments made when creating proprietary video game consoles. He added that people will want to be play video games in other places aside from the living room.
He then proceeded to comment on why big game console makers will face big challenges in transitioning to a market where people want to purchase, create and play games online:
Everything they know how to do is wrong. They start in a well. They think that brand matters. They think that their marketing expertise matters. They think that a pile of art work and a box matters. They have got a bunch of people paid huge salaries with years of expertise who would never dream of firing themselves because they have got the wrong domain expertise. And so Disney, for example, would never have funded the $200 million project to build Club Penguin, but boy they paid $700 million like little b to buy it after it hit the market. ...
So the weird thing is that the expertise and the skill set to create these games -- they are not really rocket science to make -- it is just an entirely new mentality. The big budgets and the money and all the stuff these companies have that are entrenched are not an advantage, they are an encumbrance.
As for the Wii's success, St. John pointed out that the only reason it met with success is the fact that it had a different controller. A trend, he pointed out, that is similar to what happened in Arcades. He then proceeded to say that the console business is "starting to behave like that dead arcade business."
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