Soundwave on 12 May 2013
I actually don't think anyone's probably articulated the problem. Saying smartphones/tablets only addresses one part of the issue, to which posters on this board can easily say "pffft ... no hardcore gamer iz going to play Angry Birds instead of Halo".
OK true.
But the issue is deeper than that. I think entertainment has changed radically in the last 15 years. I think we are living in what I call the "backlog generation". Meaning there's so many entertainment options that a person can't possibly have the time to experience even 1/3 of them.
If you grew up in the 1980s/most of the 90s, you had like maybe 20-30 TV channels. There was no internet. There was no Netflix, so you rented 1 or 2 movies at a time from Blockbuster Video for the weekend maybe. There was maybe 2-3 "big" summer movies every year like Jurassic Park, which you went to see 3-4 times over and over again. There wasn't a new $200 million dollar movie out every week of the summer.
There was no PVR. If you wanted to "record" that episode of X-Files you had to religious program your VCR and make sure you had a blank cassette sitting around. If you were on a bus or a plane, your entertainment options were basically a book, a discman/walkman (in which you'd carry around 12-15 songs at a time tops unless you wanted to lug around multiple cassettes/CDs). Or you had a black & white Game Boy, lol.
Youtube was called America's Funniest Home Videos, and it was kinda lame. If you needed to organize an event, you called people by hand on a regular ol' telephone and made plans that way.
That was it. Today, most people just on their smartphones alone could spend hundreds of hours consuming content from the internet, Youtube, download full seasons of TV shows, play games, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc.
I have things sitting on my PVR that I swear I'm going to get around to watching but never find the time. I swore I'd get around to watching Breaking Bad on Netflix, and just did, but I haven't even started on Walking Dead. I have 100+ ebooks sitting on my iPad that I haven't read. I have tons of 3DS/PS3/360/Wii games I haven't played through yet. Just don't have the time.
THIS is actually the problem with video games I think. Getting a person to sit down for 15+ hours to invest in ONE game when they are being pulled in 100 different directions is going to be increasingly more difficult for game makers. Especially once the razzle dazzle of fancy graphics becomes just "normal" then it almost becomes a chore to "beat" some games.
I find myself almost having to force myself to play some games, even legitimately good ones, almost out of guilt, lol (well I paid $60 for this, I should at least play it for more than 3 hours).
