Will Wright is of the opinion that although the mobile and portable gaming market is expanding, it will not spell the end for console games, which will always have a market of their own.
When a person is responsible for designing both the Sims and SimCity, then it is fair to say that his opinion matters. The person is Will Wright and while everyone else is predicting the decline of home consoles in the next few years, Mr. Wright, is not
as pessimistic.
Over the past few years Smartphones and tablets, such as Apple’s iPad, have become increasingly popular platforms for gaming. Titles such as Rovio’s Angry Birds and Angry Birds Space together have pushed the series close to 1-billion downloads and Infinity
Blade on the iPad also demonstrate the tablet’s potential as a gaming device.
Epic Games have also claimed that the iPad 3 is more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and future iterations will be able to run the Unreal Engine even better.
Many saw this as the beginning of the end for the consoles Wright does not “think they’re doomed. I think they’re not to become the mainstay of the market like they had been.”
An interesting proposition one has to admit but what did he mean by that exactly? Wright elaborated on his earlier statement by stating that, “there’ll probably still be dedicated game machines going forwards, sitting on a shelf next to your HDTV. I think
they’re going to be catering to a very specific kind of player, which probably isn’t that different from what they were catering to before.”
He explained that these days “a lot more people are now playing games and they’re not playing it on that device (consoles”.
Wright also commented on how the “diversification” of the gaming audience has led to the “explosion in platforms” and that is something that consoles will need to address if they wish to remain mainstream, otherwise they need to get specific about which
segment or demographic they are catering to and focus on that.
It makes sense if one looks at it yet with neither Microsoft nor Sony having revealed their next-generation consoles it is too early to jump to any conclusions.
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