The DeanBeat: The accelerated change of the game industry

It used to be that video game industry cycles were predictable. The waves were big, but you could see them coming. In 1994, when I moved to Silicon Valley, Netscape had gone public. I witnessed the whole dotcom boom and all of the hopes that arose around massively multiplayer online games, which was the game industry’s version of the dotcom cycle. Dozens of titles were born, but only World of Warcraft came to dominate that new piece of the game world.

The era of 3D graphics created a revolution in gaming that more than 70 graphics chip startups helped serve. Of those, only Nvidia, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices survived. With each new game console cycle, game publishers and developers came and went. The cycles were so familiar that everybody thought a cycle had to last five years. (Microsoft changed that and shrank the cycle to four years with the original Xbox, and now it is going past seven years with the Xbox 360). Price cuts became an annual tradition.