An article of mine on the future of the business of gaming, as appeared recently on NASSCOM.
You don’t have to be ‘Baba Gamedev’ to predict what’s going to happen in the games business in the future. You just have to be ‘commonsensical’, and understand the obvious:
You don’t have to be a nerd techno freak
To succeed in games today and in the future, you need to be a business person, not a ‘geekologist’. You need to observe markets, trends, consumer behaviour and most importantly cash flow. You need to be able to take risk, finance that with venture capital and create a business around hits and misses, while hiring geeks and freaks, not necessarily being one of them.
Silly, funny, disposable, global gaming is in
Just take a look at the top games on the Android and iTunes market. Most of them are what is commonly referred to as ‘casual’ games. I take it a step further. I look at them as silly, nonsensical and disposable games that people play, enjoy and forget.
This is because variety is in, loyalty is not. The future of games belongs to those who can accept impermanence and make it their business model.
Marketing is out, content is king
In the past, games organisations and networks colluded to entertain themselves, not their consumers! This resulted in terrible titles being force-fed to consumers who had limited choice.
The future is going to be about the freedom of choice! Games will not be played because an operator or an ISP or for that matter, even a television commercial tells me so; games will be played by consumers when their friends tell them to play, because friends don’t lie. And friends, like normal humans, love good content not good advertising.
Discovery is the big new challenge
The velocity of games going up on the app stores is frightening. Given that the consumer base will not ramp up as fast, game discovery is going to be the biggest challenge in the future for game organisations
Many titles, rigorous rocket science type analytics, expert cross marketing and of course lots of luck will be the ingredients to crack the code of Games Discovery!
The future of games is as bright as it ever can be! Just get your sunglasses along!
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Abhi5hek Gite
Hey Alok,
you are spot on in saying that Causal gaming is catching up big time and you see that happening even on the ‘Serious’ gaming platforms like console with add-ons like move / kinect / wii, which are designed to make gaming more Fun for the causal gamers and fence sitters.
But coming back to mobile platforms, I think when you say “The Big Challenge” is discovery, you are dead right again, coz as an avid gamer myself when i visit app store, i only see the usual culprits, temple run, Where is my water, angry birds, subway surfer etc etc .. which i have played long back and no more interested in. I find it terribly hard to find new and interesting games which i would absolutely love to try and stick to, if i like, for a few more months.
And this is where I kind of disagree with you when u say marketing is out. If you are referring to the OLD school marketing, then definitely it has been out since ages, but I am sure as all the other domains are evolving, an evolved form of marketing which makes People Aware of the Good Content, and where to find it, is definitely the need of the hour as haystack of games is getting bigger by the minute and your chances to find that needle that you Love in that is getting thinner and thinner with every sec that goes.