Building Bridges

Such products have been part of the winter line-up for some years - with the present trend in that direction started, I'd argue, by the appearance of Sony's Eye Toy and Harmonix' Guitar Hero at the tail end of the PlayStation 2 generation of hardware. The DS and the Wii are two absolutely key exemplars of this trend, but karaoke game Singstar and quiz title Buzz also belong in that hall of fame, as do the later expansions upon the Guitar Hero model such as Rock Band. It's easy to dismiss this entire category as "casual", but it's also lazy and unhelpful. These were games and platforms that bridged a gap between gamers and a wider audience that weren't opposed to being engaged in games, but needed to see products that appealed to them. Not everyone wants to slay dragons or shoot burly marines.

Where is the industry's new Wii? Where is the new Guitar Hero? Where, even, is the new Buzz? Nintendo is still plugging away at this sector, of course, but no matter how promising the Wii U may be, it's still a year away and a rather unknown quantity - while the 3DS, as likeable a platform as it may be, is little other than a direct evolution of the DS. The closest thing to a fresh, engaging new effort this Christmas is probably Kinect Disneyland Adventures, but Kinect itself, unfortunately, seems to have made a bigger impact among the enthusiast community using it for interesting things as a PC peripheral than it has among game developers and consumers. I hope Disneyland Adventures can enjoy strong long-tail sales, but feel that Microsoft has work to do in terms of re-positioning Kinect as a desirable peripheral for its console.

I'd like to see the industry focus more on building the kind of bridges that we were so enthusiastic about only a few years ago, when the Wii, the DS and Rock Band ruled the imaginations of executives

Naturally, there are plenty of places that you can point to if you want to indicate innovation taking place in the games business. There's iOS, for one, which brings us back to the start of this column. There's the resurgent PC indie scene, and even the rather more tightly controlled and staid Xbox Live and PSN environments. All manner of interesting stuff is happening with regard to new business models and new game design, and we're finally starting to iron out the idea that a game which incorporates a business model into its design from the outset is intrinsically more "cynical" or "exploitative" than a game which is going to be stuffed into a box and sold for forty quid. (Of course, it can be more cynical or exploitative, but that doesn't have to be the case, and in the best instances, absolutely isn't.)

I worry, however, about the notion that we're entering an era when the traditional games market focuses on making ever more refined and attractive iterations of existing titles for a core market, while all innovation and progress takes place in social, mobile, freemium markets. Those markets are exciting. They're important. They're rapidly changing and evolving, and they're going to be an important part of our business in the future - but they're not everything. The idea that because people have a phone in their pocket which can play freemium games, they just won't go out and buy the next Rock Band, or the next Wii, is predicated on an utterly false assumption that this is a zero-sum game. Different experiences, different social contexts, different motivations.

This is a great time to be a core gamer, and I'm happy about that - but in the interest of next year and the year after also being great, I'd like to see the industry focus more on building the kind of bridges that we were so enthusiastic about only a few years ago, when the Wii, the DS, Rock Band and all the rest of it ruled the imaginations of executives everywhere. Those initiatives didn't turn into immortal, golden egg laying geese, of course, but they did create hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and cracked open a previously untapped market hungry for videogame experiences. iOS and Facebook have gone even further, of course, but the opportunity hasn't gone away. 2011 has been a year of wonderful games, but also a year of intense navel-gazing - an inward turn for the traditional sector of the medium. Let's hope that 2012 sees us looking outwards once more.