Xbox co-creator: Gamers "voting with their money"
Innovative Leisure's Seamus Blackley on the current console cycle
Innovative Leisure's Seamus Blackley has attributed the success of recent Kickstarter projects like Ouya to gamers' need for something new.
"The consoles are old. There's not really a lot of interesting new content coming out en masse," he told GamesBeat.
"Witness the unbelievable phenomenon today on Kickstarter, Ouya, that represents a huge amount of pent-up demand from console customers, people who want a new console. That's them voting with their money."
Blackley, who recently rounded up a team of ex-Atari game designers to make iPad and iPhone games, added that too much stock could be put in trying to follow the trends, including social gaming.
"If you look at it as a pure business proposition, you say, well, social is hot here, games that are social are going to win. It's not true. Games that are good are going to win. You can actually almost accurately track the growth and contraction in the games business according to whether or not the games we were producing were satisfying."
He said falling console sales were nothing to be concerned about. It's a natural part of the cycle, and fans weren't tiring of the big screen experience, but they were tiring when it came to the type of content that was being delivered.
"You see people willing to give millions of dollars for PC games," he said of recent Kickstarter successes.
"It doesn't indicate that the audience is looking to be entertained in new ways. It indicates that the audience is looking to be entertained in the ways that they love, and it doesn't necessarily follow the business cycle a lot of people are predicting."
Innovative Leisure launched in February with backing from THQ to create arcade style titles for iOS.
I too don't think that social is the magic word. Social games can be good but it's not the only ingredient that makes a game successful.
Posted:10 months ago