26th February 2013, 6:28 AM
They aren't the only ones on the "cell phones have made game handhelds and maybe even consoles pointless" bandwagon. A legitimate argument might be made for handhelds, I suppose, if one could get around the fact that affording one basically requires leasing your soul for 3 years at a stretch, or the lack of proper controls without some sort of 3rd party addon which may or may not ever get wide support. Consoles are a much tougher sale. Apparently the argument takes the form of "The TV is so far away, WAAAY over there, and so it isn't personal like a tablet, and everyone uses a tablet, no one uses TVs, well I don't, do you? Loser...". While the substance of that argument is pretty dang shallow and sounds like pure guessing, there's no arguing against the fact that phones have basically taken over where the Wii once held sway. Casual gamers now have the most easy to whip out game device of all time... in their pants. Um, I could have put that better. Point is, the days when consoles could ever claim to appeal to casual gamers is now past us, and THAT seems to be the point here. All these newspapers and magazines seem to be arguing that if you aren't able to grab the casual market like the Wii once did (and the Gameboy before that), then you owe it to your investors to stop bothering with consoles and just start pumping out the cell phone games, where the "real profit" is. It is an argument about financial viability. In a sense, they may actually have a point, but there IS a hardcore audience, a group that likes to play games as a hobby, not simply as a way to kill time now and again, and consoles and handhelds, and juiced up home PCs, are needed to really grab that market. Without it, all those hobbyists will eventually just start collecting systems from the past and lamenting the good old days. I mean I do that anyway, but I also get modern stuff now and again.
More to the point, the "savvy investor" advice from non hobbyist reviewers is almost always entirely off the mark if you consider the long view. These are the same sorts who said any bank that isn't part of the credit swapping "ecosystem" is "stuck in the past" and needs to catch up if they are going to be competitive, then the housing bubble burst, and the only banks that were unaffected were those who stuck with a higher standard for giving loans and stayed out of the bundled future derivative flipping the table outside the box synergistic nonsense everyone else was doing.
In the long run, we don't have enough information to really know what will happen. Remember that once upon a time, 2 or 3 years ago, all the investors and writers were convinced that "social network games" were a "must" or your game company would fail. Now the only company who's entire business model seemed to be based on "find the most easily distracted audience you can find, give them a free game designed around that, then keep them playing for years and years", Zynga, has failed because everyone simply lost interest. Fancy that. There is still an ecosystem for these things on the Facebook, but every game is basically just a passing fancy.
Phone games, even at their finest, still end up playing casual. An attempt is being made to port the classics to phones, but they all control terribly. Even the RPGs aren't really being retooled from the ground up, and a game like Chrono Trigger has enough action in it (such as hiding behind trees when the wind blows while climbing a certain mountain) that touch controls simply fail. SOME games are going to play great on a phone. Sony recently had a team port Lemmings to it, a game that seems destined for a touch screen. Unfortunately, the port job was embarrassingly shoddy, showing that they just aren't as willing to invest the time and effort into games that'll sell for a pittance. Future phones may change this. Future shell designs may be made of some sort of shape memory allow that can "grow" buttons into place one day, and maybe a strong ecosystem of really high quality games will spring up, but until that day, cell phones seem destined for more casual games, and the occasional touch RPG spinoff of a popular main console series.
More to the point, the "savvy investor" advice from non hobbyist reviewers is almost always entirely off the mark if you consider the long view. These are the same sorts who said any bank that isn't part of the credit swapping "ecosystem" is "stuck in the past" and needs to catch up if they are going to be competitive, then the housing bubble burst, and the only banks that were unaffected were those who stuck with a higher standard for giving loans and stayed out of the bundled future derivative flipping the table outside the box synergistic nonsense everyone else was doing.
In the long run, we don't have enough information to really know what will happen. Remember that once upon a time, 2 or 3 years ago, all the investors and writers were convinced that "social network games" were a "must" or your game company would fail. Now the only company who's entire business model seemed to be based on "find the most easily distracted audience you can find, give them a free game designed around that, then keep them playing for years and years", Zynga, has failed because everyone simply lost interest. Fancy that. There is still an ecosystem for these things on the Facebook, but every game is basically just a passing fancy.
Phone games, even at their finest, still end up playing casual. An attempt is being made to port the classics to phones, but they all control terribly. Even the RPGs aren't really being retooled from the ground up, and a game like Chrono Trigger has enough action in it (such as hiding behind trees when the wind blows while climbing a certain mountain) that touch controls simply fail. SOME games are going to play great on a phone. Sony recently had a team port Lemmings to it, a game that seems destined for a touch screen. Unfortunately, the port job was embarrassingly shoddy, showing that they just aren't as willing to invest the time and effort into games that'll sell for a pittance. Future phones may change this. Future shell designs may be made of some sort of shape memory allow that can "grow" buttons into place one day, and maybe a strong ecosystem of really high quality games will spring up, but until that day, cell phones seem destined for more casual games, and the occasional touch RPG spinoff of a popular main console series.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)