As industry revenues fall, a new video asks whether video game companies have learned the lessons of the recession and changing consumer preferences.
The video on Game Theory with Scott Steinberg examines the state of the business in interviews with a number of luminaries such as Gaikai chief executive David Perry, Electronic Arts founder and Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins (pictured), and The Sims creator Will Wright. The video asks whether game companies are moving fast enough to adapt to changes such as the delivery of games as a service on platforms such as Facebook and free-to-play games that are financed by virtual goods sales.
“For much of the history of the industry, it was a winner take all, single platform model – clearly it’s never going to be that way again,” Hawkins says in the video. “In the future, any kind of game company [has] to have a technology approach that gives them the agility to cross platform boundaries. That’s where gaming really needs to go – to become like software as a service. It’s going to be about simplicity and convenience and making that model work.”
Adds game designer Jason Rubin, “We have to change. And I think that what will happen in the next few years is that we will make those changes, become profitable again, and there will be yet another heyday. The stimulus for that change will be a distribution change in going digital.”
And Wright says, “I think we’re in the Cambrian explosion of games, where all these weird new life forms are popping out for the very first time and filling these niches that are appearing dramatically. And of course a lot of the old, established things are going to be dying off pretty rapidly, even the major life forms. But more than anything else, I see this being the healthiest thing that could happen in the industry.”
The video is a second in a multi-part series on the video game industry. Part one is here. Check out the video below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7urDz_J-Gg&w=640&h=385]