The Generation Gap

It's the question every developer tries to dodge in interviews. If they don't know the answer they could end up looking clueless, and if they do know the answer, well, then they have to be really careful about what they say. It's the journalist's stalwart, the fanboy's obsession, and an inevitable part of an industry that's always looking forward. So, how about that next generation?

"I'm not even allowed to speculate," cries out Epic's Mike Capps across a plate of macaroons when faced with the question. "Because if I speculate then... you know..."

One thing is for sure, it's a whole different ball game to the last time shiny plastic boxes were dropped into the clammy hands of queuing gamers. Free-to-play has shown you don't need AAA titles or a AAA budget to make money, and cloud computing suggests that eventually all a gamer will need to play blockbuster titles is a television with the right connection. So is the next generation even about consoles? Where do mobiles and tablets fit in? And what can a series of different sized devices offer a world that's hungry for fast connected content?

GamesIndustry.biz cornered a group of industry insiders, each representing a different area of the current gaming market, and each with their own, very specific interests in what the next generation might be, to ask what "next generation" will mean this time around.

The AAA Guy

Luckily, Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, did decide to speculate a little. And if you listen to anyone when it comes to next gen, the Epic boys are a good shout. They influenced key technical decisions in the development of the original Xbox, so there's a good chance they know what the hardware manufacturers are planning this time around. But, he says, this time it's mobile and PC that are the major influences on the market.

"Mobile gaming has so changed in the US," he says. "To me, the iPhone, is pretty close to Xbox one tech, and if they keep multiplying 9x every year it's not going to be long before it's past 360 and whatever is next from Microsoft."

"And of course web gaming, PC gaming is back, and it's really exciting to have that new model, but I'm not sure how really they all play nicely together right now. Folks are loving omnipresent gaming, so that's great, but that's not the console model."

Capps argues that it's not that consoles and triple AAA titles will be killed off come the next generation, but that intellectual property will have to change to encompass all the new platforms together.

"Playing Skyrim on the big TV at home versus playing Infinity Blade?" he says of Epic's iOS success.

"I'm super proud of it, but you know it's hard to beat stereo sound and a big TV screen, and that's something I want a console for, I don't want to sit in a chair at a desk and play on my PC. So I don't think that's going away, but you really want to find a way to engage people on all of those spheres with an IP now, in a way that you just didn't need to ten years ago. You could ship Splinter Cell and that was it. It was Splinter Cell and it was awesome and you played it and you liked it, and you'd want to get home to play it again, and we don't have that anymore."

The Tech Guy

Life away from a single, unconnected box was something that Jason Gregory, lead programmer at Naughty Dog, agreed with. As a Sony studio Naughty Dog is on the very edge of what PlayStation 3 can do, and it will be the studio that Sony will turn to when they want to show what the next PlayStation can do.

"Hardware can grow in lots of different ways. It can grow in terms of a single console, it can grow in terms of the capability of the cloud or the web, and I think all of those are pretty exciting avenues for the future of games."

Unsurprisingly for a programmer, he wants improvements that will change the power of machines, allowing for the very smallest improvements that would have a big impact on the way AAA titles for console feel to play.

"There's a lot of room still for technology to grow and for the technologies in games to grow," he says.

"We've done quite a bit of exploration into 3D graphics and we've come quite a ways there but in terms of say physics, cloth simulation, fluids, all of these things, more horsepower is just going to mean better quality simulations in those areas, and that will lead to even richer environments. And then things like massive hordes of AI driven characters, so I think given better hardware the industry will just continue to do more and more interesting things."

Saying the next generation will mean a character's t-shirt looks a little prettier might seem obvious, but a developer struggling to create a really beautiful AAA could be forgiven for thinking all that had been forgotten in the gold rush for casual gamer's dollars. While everyone wants whatever game they're playing to look pretty, no one is ditching mobile games because the texturing on the Angry Birds' feathers is a little off.

The Mobile Guy

One man who is right at the heart of the mobile revolution is the ebullient Oscar Clark, PapayaMobile's very own evangelist.

"I don't know what the next generation means anymore," he admits, adjusting his hat. He's spent years working with the "next big things" in mobile and online games, always around ten years before people started calling it that.

"I'm not entirely sure the next console is going to be an evolutionary step change, necessarily," he says. He thinks the big change will come when the services become bigger than the box they ship with.

"What will happen to the PSN Store, the Xbox Live, will they become more important than the device itself? I'd like to think so. And if they don't I think it will be interesting to see what happens to the console."

Rather than a box that can do everything, he predicts we'll see more boxes, especially as the world becomes more connected, because "we're not talking about stuttered generational changes anymore, because the joy of online is iterative. So we've gone from land grab moments to an ongoing evolution."

He even suggests the next generation is about men, in a room, making something that people want to play.

"The opportunity to make dramatic changes is open to almost anybody now, so you've got two man bands in China able to make a thousand dollars a day just by making a really good social game for mobile phone. It's not big in the huge scheme of things, but for those two guys in China that's a lot of money. Actually from a game development point of view, that's a real innovation."

The Digital Guy

Whatever these new devices that Clark predicts are, they'll need content, and discs are starting to look like quite an old fashioned way to deliver that content. Dan Connors is the CEO of Telltale Games, which has been delivering digital episodic content in the form of Sam & Max and Back To The Future long before it was fashionable.

He thinks the big hardware manufacturers will still lead the pack even as the industry shifts from physical media into machines that focus on digital content, and that we'll be all be doing the cha-cha with a virtual friend in the near future.

"Digital distribution allows us to reach more customers, devices like the tablet and the phone make it really easy to play, but something like Kinect creates a whole new way of interfacing - so being able to talk to the game, being able to dance with NPCs, being able to do all this stuff that probably is a few years off, but not that far away," he predicts, sat in a little booth surrounded by posters for his latest project, The Walking Dead.

"Once the opportunity is there people are going to build them. That's still going to require intelligent hardware architecture, and I think the leaders are still the people who can do that - Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Their devices are still going to allow the most cutting-edge interactions with content, and it just makes sense for them to be able to own the storefront, because everyone's connected and they can. That's where the transition is going to lie."

The MMO Guy

So far CCP has managed to avoid a lot of the issues that would concern a traditional developer, by developing and publishing its own MMO, EVE: Online. But it's currently working on Dust 514, a game designed for PlayStation 3 that will connect with the EVE universe. Is this what Capps meant about omnipresent gaming?

"I think you're already seeing that a lot of games are platform agnostic," offers Nikola Cavic, senior sales manager.

"Like EVE Online, Dust, it's going to be about one IP spanning different platforms, there very well might be an extension to web, like we have with EVE Gate, or later on with applications for mobile. So I think that's definitely where we're heading. With more accessibility and the popularity of cloud gaming and services it's going to be really interesting to see how that comes into play. It definitely looks exciting. More connectivity for sure."

It's a view backed up by other conversations GamesIndustry.biz has had with publishers like Ubisoft, who now create a multi-platform blueprint for all their big IPs. Got an idea for a great console action game? Then you'd better have ideas for iOS, Facebook and handheld devices too.

So more digital content, IPs that people can access regardless of their device, better cloth textures... But what about the guys that are already one step ahead of that? Who are creating the next step in free-to-play titles, that have made the break from the big studios and the consoles to create games in a new way?

The Social Gaming Guy

Greg Borrud is one of those guys. If his name is familiar it's because he was one of the founders of Pandemic Studios, and a VP and COO at Electronic Arts. More recently he's left all that behind to launch Seismic Games, "a games studio dedicated to developing high quality next-generation social game franchises for digital platforms."

He thinks the next generation will see high end machines and their owners and casual games existing together, and evolving together.

"I don't see all the Call Of Duty guys switching over, dropping all that and all playing games on Facebook," he admits.

"I think what you've seen is now new platforms open up, new audiences open up and I think this is now the new normal for games, which is gamers everywhere playing on all different platforms and all moving forward. So I think there's all these different threads rather than it just being 'social games are now what games are.'"

"I think everyone tries to say that we've got one gaming audience, and we move that entire audience from one thing to the next. But I think what we've actually seen in the last couple of years is just the growth of this audience with multiple different platforms. When we used to talk about games it was a very clear, niche audience, and I think that's what's exciting about it for us, games are now ubiquitous."

And that's the problem with getting anyone to talk about the next generation, beyond nervous PRs waving NDAs in the background or rumours swirling across the internet like excitable fog. The next generation is already happening, but it's happening without a launch party and a queue for first retail units. Mobile and social and tablets are as much a part of the next generation as whatever Sony and Microsoft choose to show at the next big trade show, and they're evolving day by day. If anything, the hardware boys have got some catching up to do.