

The Future of Gaming: a Portrait of the New Gamers - krgaskins
http://www.latd.com/2011/08/23/the-future-of-gaming-a-portrait-of-the-new-gamers/

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patio11
I was hoping to hear something about demographics, but it seems to be wishful-
thinking about games being something more than an entertainment medium. Maybe
that will happen, maybe it won't. On the more prosaic question of what will
change in the pursuit of separating people from money with video games:

1) Gamers will continue to get older, more female, and richer.

2) Games will increasingly use -- and players will expect -- variable
monetization such as item sales ("Free2Play"), aggressive discounting/bundling
via e.g. Steam, and the like. This will cause aggressive price discrimination.
A large portion of the "traditional" game audience will be very discomfit by
this. They will be ignored.

3) The AAA games industry, built on games with feature-film budgets which need
feature-film audiences to be profitable, radically contracts to serving the
needs of a few intersecting core markets. Almost everything you see will be
sequels and variations on themes which are known to work, such as $PERSONALITY
$SPORT $YEAR.

4) Spending on games by teenagers increases because disposable games on their
mobile devices perversely bring in more revenue than full-price traditional
games, since a) they can trivially effect payment for things on their mobiles
and b) piracy has almost totally cannibalized traditional games.

5) Physical distribution of games becomes a niche industry which attracts the
worst possible kind of gaming customer. Steam and a few winners in
social/MMORPG/MOBA/etc games print money. GameStop collapses with the used
game market, with the thin edge of the wedge being account-locked bonuses with
retail games which destroy their resale value among core gamers, and
continuing organic growth of Steam and similar platforms.

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NickPollard
Do you have a citation for [4b]? Piracy is certainly an issue, but it's not as
much of an issue as you think, particularly in the console space.

Plus, with internet-based authentication schemes (eg. Starcraft 2) plus online
games (eg. MMOs), it appears that even on PC, piracy is not as damaging as it
once was.

Personally, as someone who works in the Games Industry, I disagree both with
piracy as a cause, but also even with the fact that 'traditional games are
dying'. Traditional games - from First Person Shooters, to Real Time Strategy,
to Third Person Action games are all doing very well.

I think what you are noticing is that the game market as a whole is swelling,
propelled by the newer, larger markets - social games, mobile games etc. - and
thus traditional games are a much smaller part of it than before. But to say
that they are dying? That is a mistaken position.

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kosei
Interesting, but I feel like I read this article 4 years ago. Every couple of
years some research firm comes out with a study on "The New Gamer" and who
they are - "Not just basement dwellers anymore!"...

I'm not saying it's not worthwhile to continue running these studies (let's be
honest, plenty of companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy
them). But I think defining each study as "The New XXXX" is disingenuous.

Gamers are evolving over time, and the increasingly broadening scope of games
are bringing in more and more casual gamers, and also creating an opportunity
for first-time gamers to not feel entirely overwhelmed. That's been happening
for years though, with developers like PopCap, BigFishGames, and WildTangent.
It's nothing new.

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aw3c2
Sorry for an off-topic post but what a terrible website. With Javascript
disabled I got a black window (with the article already available in the HTML
source). With Javascript enabled it loaded for 14 seconds (yeah, I started
counting). And the result was really not worth it for reading a simply
article.

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krgaskins
Seems to be loading in a reasonable amount of time for me.

