Argh_College said:
Those games are like 0.2% of all gamers WorldWide. Iphone games alone smash those in numbers of players, buys from app store. Industry is in bad shape, you guys wont admit it ofc not... Just wait until you see Ps4 sales to be in line with Vita fiasco and this thread will reign supreme just like Kinect hit 20m thread. i´ll give this 1 year from now, save it. |
So, given the sales of games like CoD Modern Warfare 3, sitting at around 29 million across platforms now, there are about 14.5 billion gamers in your world? How does that work? The gaming industry is larger than the movie and the music industry put together. You're pulling numbers and theories out of someplace where they should never be stored. Most people aren't expecting another record breaking gen (I certainly am not) but there's a lot of middle ground between there are crash & burn, which is basically what you're implying. The biggest tablet/phone games (in sales) are all Freemium, which is to say free but with the possibility of microtransactions to unlock content, the best selling games that actually cost money and are out on modern equipment sits at around 10-12 million, hardly earth shattering when given the massive installed base (smartphones and tablets likely have a bigger installed base between them than all three current consoles combined) when full price games (60$) sell as much or more on home consoles. Mario Kart Wii has sold over 30 million units on a sub 100 million userbase, that's more than 30% attach rate, not a single thing that costs any money comes close on tablets or phones today, not even ballpark close.
Smartphones and tablets will envelop the handheld market, they are no threat to home console as of now, unless a console aims solely for the casual gamer. The primary reason why the 8th gen will likely see a shorter cycle and the individual consoles will sell less is hardware development speeding up to keep up with the market and overall tech development and the fact that we'll have more players on the floor (cue Steam Box and Apple TV).
I'm afraid you might end up looking silly in a couple of years when; A: the 8th generation of consoles is doing fine and, B: the mobile casual market will see a slew of bankrupcy calls when the market gets saturated, copyright infringement runs rampant, jailbreaking tools spread and make profits go away. Not to mention that the whole model is based on neverending growth, you'll new customers all the time, you can't simply keep selling the same thing to people when they change their phones/tablets. This market is not sustainable over many years due to a multitide of problems, the foremost will be piracy, this is already occurring with many apps today and the companies themselves stealing too much in royalties won't make matters better.
Companies like Apple will force developers away from the whole system, its too closed off, its way too costly in royalty cuts, the hardware is average, the ranking systems are unfair (top listed will keep selling while others get no light shone on them), the customers are extremely fickle and development costs will rise just like they have with consoles. This teamed with aforementioned widespread piracy will stop this model eventually. You think people will pay for even cheap things when they can get them for free? Tablets and phones will likely be forced into a Netflix/Spotify model for games fairly soon to make it somewhat viable, this will greatly lower profit margins, especially if the providers (i.e; Apple, Google etc) insist on bleeding folks for big royalty amounts. Peddling ridiculous amounts of software for tiny profits won't make anyone happy in the long run. This market seems fine now but is headed for stormy weather on the horizon.
The future is not clear cut and the 8th generation of consoles will not be the last one. Home consoles are evolving and will continue doing so and aren't going anywhere any time soon. Dedicated handhelds, however, will soon be a thing of the past.
This is my take on things anyway, I believe quite a few people would agree.
PS: Using the 3DS as an example of doing it right might be a bad idea, its in the one market that will likely disappear next.
