Carmack: Unquestionable that mobile will surpass consoles
industrygamers.com
industrygamers.com
If you read the article Carmack is saying that the processing of power of mobile devices will exceed current generation consoles, not that the sales will.
About sales he says:
"Could the bottom drop out on the triple A market because everyone’s playing Angry Birds? It doesn’t seem to be happening. The numbers don’t show that. We’re selling more big titles than ever before, despite having all of these other platforms out there."
About processing power he says:
"it’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles."
"So it looks like it’s parallel growth rather than one stealing from the other."
My interpretation is that there is a massive market for convenient casual games that has been neglected for a long time. That market is exploding and represents huge revenue opportunities, but because it targets an entirely different customer base, it is not hurting sales in the serious gaming market.
Certainly with dual/quad core chipsets, we are close to or past the power of the Wii and if there was a better industry standard around such things you could even create a kind of built-in "meta console" platform within TV's. Then you don't even have to buy a separate device, your TV just plays games as long as you have a controller. That would probably sell more HDTV's than 3-D TV technology would.
All I know is if you can get an ARM chipset that can reliably spit out 720p games at 30fps with reasonably good quality, built into a TV that had say 10,000 games available for under $10 (I'm looking at you iOS and Android), parents woudln't buy their kids 360's or PS3's. They'd just buy apps that run on their tv.
What would people gain from buying yet another device, and what do you mean by a "meta console"? Something like OnLive? Because otherwise, you're not going to see anywhere near the performance that the current consoles get. While graphics don't make the game, shiny graphics do help to sell games.
The product that the parent post describes is priced like an impulse buy ($99), has no monthly fee , integrates beautifully with millions of popular devices (Airplay with iTunes, iPads, iPhones, iPods) and Apple would make it as trivial as possible to port games/apps from their already popular platforms to the new TV format... If they indeed keep the pricing as cheap as Apple TV, it could be practically ubiquitous and the network effects for social games and Facetime-like apps would thus be a major competitive edge.
I don't think it's hard to imagine Apple disrupting the consoles. Of course, it's more likely that they'll try to stay intensely focused on their two existing platforms for the foreseeable future. Then again, I have a feeling that the merging of Android with Google TV makes the marriage of iOS and Apple TV more likely - they know that the home's "big screen" is a future battleground for these platforms.
And unfortunately the browser is crap. :-(
The best mobile phones are not quite as powerful as the XBox 360 or the PS3, but from what I see, they've already got the Wii beat quite handily. Remember, not only does the Wii tend to look less good than the XBox 360/PS3, it's doing it at a much lower resolution, too.
In fact I've been spending my last few nights playing Persona 4, one of the last games that came out for the PS2, and if I saw that on the Wii I wouldn't exactly be surprised by the low quality or anything. There's a reason they could sell the Wiis at a profit for $250 right out of the gate, with several tens of those dollars actually going to the controller packed with it. It isn't actually that powerful.
Currently they're using the remote control for input, but if they could access USB devices properly they could utilise the 360 USB dongle to take input.
I don't understand why they do not keep the console operating system consistant, and update hardware every 18 months. xbox loading times, game prices etc. are a pain when the alternative is to boot up your phone or browser and play for 5-10 minutes at a time. Sony had the Ericsson partnership they did nothing with, and Microsoft had Microsoft .. and nothing came of either.
The more exciting element is gaming moving to the browser. webgl is coming to the mobile browsers soon. I just happen to be watching this demo video yesterday of RAGE running on webgl in a browser:
bit of a 'holy shit the world is changing' moment
Consistent hardware is the reason consoles have been so attractive to develop for -- you don't have to worry about leaving 30% of your market behind because you want to use OpenGL ES 2.0, you don't worry about having performance differences between different phones, you don't worry about one configuration having multiple cores and another not. Microsoft went so far to ensure consistency in their hardware performance profile that when the Xbox 360 was moved from discrete CPU/GPU to a SoC for their new slim version they built a front-side bus on die.
Different hardware profiles is why AAA games just seemed to evaporate on the PC for a while. Even now with Direct3D 10 and 11 having given developers a much more stable target to aim for it's still a pain to develop for them. With the mobile market's mix of instruction sets (NEON, VFP, soft FP), graphics libraries (GLES 1.1, 2.0) and their different implementations (necessitating things like this: http://aras-p.info/blog/2010/09/29/glsl-optimizer/), plus core counts, clock speeds, screen sizes, and operating systems, it's getting worse in mobile than it was for PC.
For the most part console/PC games and mobile games are different in player usage too -- saying "why play a console game when you can boot your phone or browser for 5-10 minutes at a time" is like saying "why watch a movie when you can watch cat videos on Youtube". Different audience, different itches scratched.
As for the "WebGL Rage" demo, it's neat but it's very misleading. First he's just displaying assets from the iOS version of Mutant Bash, it's not even the full Mutant Bash game, let alone the full game of Rage.
The move towards 3D realism on modern consoles (Xbox360, PS3 and successors) has driven up costs, driven down release cycles and basically given things that many (if not most) people don't actually care that much about.
The App Store has proven there is a serious market for lower-priced games with wide distribution, something the content industry as a whole has failed of grasp over the last decade or more in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Modern Warfare 2, for example, was the highest grossing entertainment launch in history, including blockbuster movies, making a third of a billion dollars in a single day. Today only perhaps 2 or 3 films have had higher box office revenues than Modern Warfare 2 has made. No sane person would pass up a chance for such revenues. More so when you consider that at that scale games cost far less than movies to produce: MW2 cost about $60 million to make, whereas Avatar had a budget of $237 million, Titanic had a budget of $200 million, and even the Return of the King had a budget of $94 million.
Hollywood seems to be chugging along just fine, and the gaming industry seems to have lower costs and comparable revenues.
Console makers license tons of exclusive content, Apple just isn't getting into the game software game(yet?).
Developers of small inexpensive games target the larger, established PC market, and iDevices get the runoff.
Compare the sales of indy games on steam(one example) vs. any apple platform.
My personal opinion is that the iPad over-hypes the few games it has because it fails as a useful work tool, it's an expensive toy. Limited use as a web platform will not be enough to establish a game platform, software always does. Time will tell, I might be wrong.
Consoles (and PC's for that matter) offer up several things that phones can not offer.
1) Decent controls. Controls for phone based games are terribly imprecise; to the point where even games specifically designed for phone controls don't always do what you want them to do. Even phones with hardware controls are uncomfortable for someone like me to use for a long period of time (Such as the PSP Go and it's new mobile successor)
2) Gaming on large displays. I don't mind my mobile gaming - I've owned most handhelds since the gameboy - but I don't want to play Rage or Skyrym on a screen less than 11" diagonal.
3) Stable hardware specs. I don't have to worry that my 3 year old 360 won't play Skyrym when it's released. I do have to wonder if my original droid will play the latest hotness in games.
4) Stable internet connections. I've tried an MMO on a phone; the lag was unacceptable.
5) I can play on a console all day long and not worry about battery life.
6) Textures. No handheld can match the texture resolution of the consoles, simply due to the storage requirements for the graphics & limitations on realistic bandwidth use to download a game on a phone.
Sure, the current consoles are starting to show their age. But their _launch_ titles still look better than any phone game I've ever seen, and we're nearing the point where new consoles will start making their appearance (see Nintendo's recent announcement about their new console).
Most of the market doesn't "seriously game". Most of the market isn't interested in games more complicated than farmville or Angry Birds.
"Most of the market" is where the majority of the money is to be made is found.
Zynga may be making money by the bucketload, but Zinga is the exception (and very heavily dependent on Facebook; there's plenty of horror stories around about how this kind of dependency can bite you in the end). Most other developers of casual games are not so lucky (with an average of $3,800 per title). Not exactly blockbuster hits, let alone a "majority" of anything.
That's the conclusion I'm arguing against.
So, mobile phone voice quality is not as good as landline quality, but good enough - plus, you can use it wherever you are. Microcomputers are not as powerful as mainframes, but powerful enough - plus cheaper and smaller. While some customers in some circumstances may still need the extra quality/power of the incumbent, the big profits go to the disruptor.
Do console graphics overserve most customers? If not, how close are they to it? (Note: while there is obviously room for improvement, the key question is whether customers want that improvement. If they are overserved, the improvement just doesn't matter.) Apart from the popularity of casual games, one test is that PC versions of games have better graphics than current consoles - yet, the console editions are outselling them. It seems that customers value something other than graphics.
Imagine if kinect-like software were integrated in iOS 6 or 7. Your apps could use it as input. So you make a game that does, then users put the iPad in a stand next to your big screen tv, connect it, and play 'iPad Dance Jam 7' or whatever. I could easily see that happening.
No, no they aren't. Traditional gaming and the current mobile gaming are completely different experiences. It's like the difference between someone who plays games and a "gamer" (forgive my Scotsman here, it's for an analogy).
While both someone who plays games and a "gamer" might put in a decent amount of hours a week on Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, or whatever the mobile fad of the moment is, the "gamer" is not going to be as satisfied with that. They're going to be drooling over the latest videos for Skyrim, the next Battlefield game, or Deus Ex. A simple mobile game does not scratch that itch. They're completely different experiences, and I've gotten so tired of people equating the two.
It's like saying YouTube is going to overtake movies, because people totally love watching videos of cats. Sure, they spend hours doing that, but no matter how many cute animal videos, vlogs, or LPs they watch, it's never going to serve the same need as a nice big screen movie.
</rant>
So, those companies work incredibly hard just to break even in hopes of long term profits. A break even company is going to bleed themselves to death competing with a company selling popular products at a 35% gross margin.
At the end of the day it boils down to profits and Apple has so much profit and cash that if they have a good enough product, they can dominate a market in a profitable way that nobody else seems to be able to match.
COD Black ops sales in first 44 days: over 1 billion
References:
http://blog.itchannelplanet.com/2011/02/apple-dominates-glob...
http://www.bgr.com/2010/12/21/call-of-duty-black-ops-sales-s...
Note: To calculate app store game sales I am taking the total sales and inferring the amount through the statement that "over half of sales are games".
My home theater system is my ideal gaming setting, but being able to play virtually anywhere has a lot of appeal too.
I can look into actual figures, but I haven't spent more than $20 in the last 5 months on console games and have bought 20-30 ipod/iphone games in the same period, some over $15 themselves.
This is a place where the subsidized phone model really helps.