The Future of Gaming: a Portrait of the New Gamers
latd.com
latd.com
1) Gamers will continue to get older, more female, and richer.
2) Games will increasingly use -- and players will expect -- variable monetization such as item sales ("Free2Play"), aggressive discounting/bundling via e.g. Steam, and the like. This will cause aggressive price discrimination. A large portion of the "traditional" game audience will be very discomfit by this. They will be ignored.
3) The AAA games industry, built on games with feature-film budgets which need feature-film audiences to be profitable, radically contracts to serving the needs of a few intersecting core markets. Almost everything you see will be sequels and variations on themes which are known to work, such as $PERSONALITY $SPORT $YEAR.
4) Spending on games by teenagers increases because disposable games on their mobile devices perversely bring in more revenue than full-price traditional games, since a) they can trivially effect payment for things on their mobiles and b) piracy has almost totally cannibalized traditional games.
5) Physical distribution of games becomes a niche industry which attracts the worst possible kind of gaming customer. Steam and a few winners in social/MMORPG/MOBA/etc games print money. GameStop collapses with the used game market, with the thin edge of the wedge being account-locked bonuses with retail games which destroy their resale value among core gamers, and continuing organic growth of Steam and similar platforms.
1) Your average pirate would not have purchased the game they pirated anyways. 2) A lack of good game play centric demo's, shareware versions of games, expensive pricing, and Draconian DRM measures has pushed a lot of people to pirate, just so they can “TEST” the game (primarily on the PC, but to some extent on Consoles as well), before buying it. Nobody wants to spend $60+ on a piece of crap game that is locked to them as soon as they use it, and find out it was crap. Ergo, pirate, test and decide if it's worth the purchase.
Gamers definitely are a lot more willing to spend $.99-$5 for a game to play on their Smartphone or tablet then the $60 as mentioned above for an AAA PC title. (Hence the trend in the article for mobile devices being the favourite of the people surveyed. Notice handheld game devices were lower on the scales....probably because the games are still a lot higher in price.) This is why I feel the indie game space has surged so much in the last couple years, people are tired of paying all that money for games that do not satisfy even with their bigger than movie budgets. But pay a Starbucks coffee to get a game...even if you only play it for a couple days, the reward vs. value is so much higher.
As much as I’d love to have gaming become a purely digital environment as far as distribution, it has a long way to go. Primarily....we need better bandwidth allocation if we are to remove the physical distribution model. My steam account currently has over 280GB of downloadable content in it. As it sits it takes me 4-5 months to download all my steam games while staying within the 60GB/month limit of my ISP. I've stopped buying larger titles on steam and continue to purchase the physical versions so that my family can continue to browse the internet, watch Netflix and stream video via Skype to the grandparents.
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Plus, with internet-based authentication schemes (eg. Starcraft 2) plus online games (eg. MMOs), it appears that even on PC, piracy is not as damaging as it once was.
Personally, as someone who works in the Games Industry, I disagree both with piracy as a cause, but also even with the fact that 'traditional games are dying'. Traditional games - from First Person Shooters, to Real Time Strategy, to Third Person Action games are all doing very well.
I think what you are noticing is that the game market as a whole is swelling, propelled by the newer, larger markets - social games, mobile games etc. - and thus traditional games are a much smaller part of it than before. But to say that they are dying? That is a mistaken position.
I'm not saying it's not worthwhile to continue running these studies (let's be honest, plenty of companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy them). But I think defining each study as "The New XXXX" is disingenuous.
Gamers are evolving over time, and the increasingly broadening scope of games are bringing in more and more casual gamers, and also creating an opportunity for first-time gamers to not feel entirely overwhelmed. That's been happening for years though, with developers like PopCap, BigFishGames, and WildTangent. It's nothing new.