The Future of Gaming?

If you've been paying attention at all these past couple years then you will have seen the change in the gaming industry. It seems to be changing at a quickening pace, and where it'll be at the end of all this change is still unknown. Ok, what I mean is, with every new generation of consoles, game development costs increase dramatically. The exception to this fact is handheld consoles and, well, Wii games. Added to the raising development costs is the fact that companies nowadays just aren't doing well in general. None of the economy is which means there's just that much more risk in producing a game. If this pattern continues, its sort of frightening to think where the industry might end up.

Yearly sequels with less risk being taken each year on big budget games. On the flip side to this "casual" games such as, well, anything Popcap produces or games coming out for xbla/psn or whatever are growing more popular within the gaming community. Game developers can either produce a casual game that appeals to an audience that has yet to be reached, making a big profit on a game that cost little resources (see Cooking Mama, Brain Train, etc). In addition, developers have many more options nowadays to create and experiment with original game ideas without much financial risk. So with these things in mind, where does that put us in five years?

There'll always be a demand for those big budget games, and i'm sure they'll keep coming out. But when the next generation of hardware is released I think there'll be a much bigger emphasis on low cost casual games. Microsoft and Sony are certainly going to be influenced by Nintendo's tremendous success this generation and try to tap into some of that audience. Aside from that, there's more to take into consideration when looking towards the next generation of consoles.

Despite how much Nintendo might argue otherwise, online gaming is certainly a huge part of gaming today. Not only do gamers expect a user friendly online experience out of the box, there has to be an evolution of the current xbla/psn/wiiware(it tries) format. I'm sure Nintendo has made quite a bit of money with re-releasing older games on virtual console, but I can't imagine them making you re-buy them yet again next generation. I think they should make the virtual console more robust and continue with it on the next console, giving us more recent games (given they've decided to give it a real hard drive).

This is an area where Microsoft is at a bit of a loss. Since they're so new to the console gaming industry there's not a whole lot they can do in regards to re-releasing the past library of games. They did release some Xbox games for download on the marketplace but I doubt thats a big money maker. Nintendo seems fairly gung-ho about producing content gear towards their new audience. Most gamers have seen that this generation and expect it for the next. Microsoft also has a niche of gamers to speak of. Not so much so as Nintendo, but when I think of an Xbox 360 game, I think of an FPS and annoying people online.

Thats why I think Sony is in the best position to learn from everything thats happened these last few years and work towards creating a really great experience for us next gen. As nice as that sounds though I don't really see it happening. They've already stated that they wanted the PS3 to last quite awhile. In any case, I really hope the next generation of hardware has a lot less waggle. Wishful thinking I'm sure but still...