Crytek: "Next-generation of home consoles will be the last"

"But these consumers are becoming the minority."

In the grand scheme of things, yes that's true. However, they are not shrinking in numbers. If there were enough core consumers to support the games of yesterday and today with those numbers then there are enough to justify new "core" games being made on consoles and PC.

"Today's gamers buy a game for 99 cents, download it and play it for 15 to 20 minutes per day over a period of two months - and then they move on."

Well, not really true unless you're looking at one specific segment of the market... which would be really narrow-minded and could cause mistakes/mishaps when assessing business decisions/directions. Not to mention gross generalisations like that above... Plus, those gamers always existed, they are not "today's" gamers any more than gamers 10 years ago were the only kind. There isn't some sort of evolution of "gamer" going on. They existed 20 years ago when the pre-packaged solitare game in Windows was the most widely played computer game on the planet and they still exist today - it's just that the market is now catering to their tastes.

Posted:11 months ago

@ James

Indeed. Couldn't have phrased that better.

And don't even get me started on PC gamers who also have consoles. Given the PC market is the most hardcore in a lot of ways, there's still a lot of gamers who will want even a semi-decent PC gaming rig, as well as multiple consoles.

Oh, and then there's all those people who regard consoles as social activity - having a party, drinking beer and playing Bomberman or Tekken Tag with their friends. I seriously doubt that that market is "becoming the minority".

God, so much doom-saying. Why does this industry think that trying to predict the death of a market is a good thing? And why are those predicting the death so unwilling to use even semi-academic arguments, sales figures and studies?

Edit to elaborate:

When the Wii was selling massive numbers, no-one turned around and said "Oh, the core gamer demographic is shrinking because of the number of Wii consoles being bought, and most games available on the Wii are casual games". No-one said that. Everyone did turn around and say "Whoa! New gamers who are casuals! This is good."

Tell me why mobile gaming is different?

Edited 3 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 4th June 2012 9:51am

Posted:11 months ago

More like this gen is the last. Any next gen will be carbon copy of the last.

Posted:11 months ago

The most often mis-prophecied occurrence is the death of a game industry segment. People alternate between declaring PCs dead and consoles dead, and to date every one of them have been wrong.

Posted:11 months ago

Part of the reason for the pessimism is the fact that the amount of money that the "AAA" gaming industry has brought in has gone down the past four years. There are few developers and publishers that can support such products and that number has gone down since the start of this generation. The cost of next-gen games is really the question mark over whether this is sustainable.

Regardless, the big thing is that there's more uncertainty now than any other time in the industry. Yes, people are always going to want to play games on their television, but what form is that going to take? Will we stream everything directly in the near future? Nobody knows, and because of the uncertainties above, it leaves a lot of people intimate to the "AAA" gaming industry a bit pessimistic.

Posted:11 months ago

People have often said PC's will be wiped out by *insert buzzword here*, all to be proved utterly wrong, and often suspect wishful attempts to make it happen serving self-interest, I suspect consoles will be similarly resilient, for entertainment purposes I use both pc's and console's, I have games on my iphone as well, but frankly I dont play the same types of games in each medium as a general rule nor do I play them the same way.

The idea that tablet or mobile gaming alone will entirely replace consoles seems ostensibly laughable console gaming is essentially for many big screen tv gaming, I dont think your going to find console gamers enticed into abandoning their gaming on the tv's for a tiny little tablet or mobile screen.

True threat's to traditional console gaming would perhaps be perhaps future iterations of products like Appletv, which apple have sadly under utilized, and indeed the smart systems build into tv's directly, they are currently a mish-mash of different ideas with little if any gaming focus but have potentially a wider audience then traditional gaming consoles, and if combined in future iterations with sufficiently powerful hardware utilizing for instance downloading software sales, they could prove a serious contender with the consoles at least for casual and social gamers, especially as "smart" tv prices and such smart system prices go down and utilization of the same chips used in tablets and mobiles increase along with future power increases, unlikely to be the killer of the console industry as a whole but it could have pretty nasty consequences over the lifetime of the wii u for Nintendo unless their wii u really can regain Nintendo a sizable hardcore audience.

Users of existing consoles may well play casual on the same medium as their hardcore games, but dedicated purchases of the console for casual play may well fade away or drastically reduce, using a tablet will never be quite as comfortable as big screen gaming, but big screen gaming can and will compete with its console iteration, once tv companies and other contenders get their acts together and begin to fully realize the potential of these systems as console alternatives for the audience of many, a way to fight back for consoles is to push for their consoles being integrated into tv's directly as the smart system as if memory serves sony is already rumoured to be working on with their next gen console and have done before if rather to early with the ps2.

Console's are unlikely to disappear any time soon, but their likely fate is to evolve into the entertainment system market, as to weather all of the big 3 make it over intact depends on how well they plan and react to the chaning market and like with most things who out of them and their new competitors makes the least misjudgments and mistakes, and saying casual will replace hardcore is basically saying special tv series or with episodic casual soaps will replace films, not going to happen.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by Alexander McConnell on 6th June 2012 4:38pm

Posted:11 months ago