American McGee moving to casual Gaming – Video Games Update
Famed developer and level designer, American McGee, believes that the core console and PC games market is over saturated and claims that Indie and Browser based games are the way to go.
American McGee was the creator of American McGee’s Alice which was a third person action adventure platformer released in 2000 and published by Electronic Arts. Alice was a critical success scoring perfect 10s from countless review sites and has an average
of 85 percent from Metacritic.com. After the success of Alice, American McGee went on to open his own game development studio in Shanghai, China called Spicy Horse in 2007.
The highly awaited sequel to Alice titled Alice: Madness Returns was released last year but unlike its predecessor did not manage to live up to the hype. The game, although satisfying to play, was buggy and lacked polish that is expected of any ‘AAA’ title
these days. It was clear to gamers that Electronic Arts had rushed the game to the market and had not given the developer ample time to perfect it.
McGee has stated that Alice: Madness Returns was his studio’s last core game as from now onwards the studio will be exclusively focusing on free to play and browser based games.
"Our studio wouldn't consider going back to traditional console development, but I do think we'll end up being in the right place when consoles come back to us. By that I mean we fully expect the definition of 'console' to shift radically over the next two
years. Our consoles will become our mobile devices (Or if you prefer: Our mobile devices will become our consoles)," said McGee in an interview with Gameinformer magazine.
McGee claims that his studio has more revenue from the free to play model then they ever did from core games like Alice or Alice: Madness Returns.
So here is another game developer who believes that core consoles are dying and will be replaced by handhelds, mobiles and browser based free to play games. The rise of cloud gaming also means that gamers will want to be able to access their games on any
product as compared to going home and playing games on the console in front of the television.
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