EA CEO: Consoles Now Only 40% of Games Industry

[cAPSLOCK]

The future of consoles is an interesting topic. It's really hard to say what we'll see even 5 years from now. Tech is moving so fast and the increased power is forcing game makers to look in other places, I imagine that's a large reason for the rise of $1 games and $10 indie titles. Most just can't afford to enter the disc market anymore.

I can see consoles next gen being more about the downloadable titles than the disc based games. Downloadable titles being more like TV shows and disc games being seen as big budget movies by analogy. Not to mention free to play micro-transaction games (Ghost Recon WiiU and TF2 PC for example) becoming more popular.

He's right, though, graphics are at the point where people can't really tell anymore anyway. Uncharted 2 is an example of a game that looks great: while not technically impressive compared to PC stuff, the semi-realistic art direction makes it look far better than Witcher 2 (in my opinion). I may be crazy and wrong about that but I don't care. I'm sure 99% of the people out there don't either, including graphics whores. Crysis 1 still looks amazing 5 years later; we're just splitting hairs at this point.

And the drop in console popularity can be partially placed at the feet of developers. The Wii brought in a TON of people curious about gaming, and were subsequently treated like 3rd rate shit by the developer community. They shot their own foot in that particular case. Oh hey people that are new to games, let's make our D-team ambassadors to these people! Let's sabotage the efforts of the fastest selling console in history! As the Emperor said: they'll be paying for their lack of vision, for years to come.

But one thing he doesn't really touch on is that consoles are also evolving and changing with the times. They're not just boxes in front of the TV. They're media centers, social hubs, gaming hubs. MS is going to make (I think the one coming up) a Windows OS run xbox. Who knows how far that's going to go. Nintendo as always will be game-centric, but MS and Sony have no problems branching out in crazy directions. We may see a time when people buy consoles for things besides games.

There's a lot of things at a crossroads now, not just consoles. PCs, laptops, cable/satellite tv, phones. physical media, hard drives. 10 years from now this conversation might not even make any sense. 10 years ago this conversation would sound like science fiction.

Hell, we're already at a point where people are starting to question the need for TV.