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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