App based gaming remains the future of this critical segment.
- Say what you like about games but nearly one third of all time spent on smartphones is still spent playing games.
- Gaming is alive and well but it is rapidly shedding the genre of social gaming and returning to its roots in applications
- With the advent of smartphones and tablets the traditional gaming market polarised into the casual segment and the console market.
- Those who had been light console users flocked to this new medium as it better suited their usage and was much cheaper.
- It also brought many new users into the world of gaming.
- Then came Facebook and the social games like Farmville and CityVille.
- For a while, these looked like the next greatest thing and while this gaming concept was reasonably fresh, users ballooned and purchases where made inside the environments.
- Unfortunately, users are a fickle bunch meaning that unless something is properly engaging they will move on after a while.
- Many of the social games required users to buy upgrades in order to accelerate developments in the game which worked for a while.
- However, the majority of gamers were playing for free and rapidly began to tire with the slow development.
- The result was a fall in interest which has become an avalanche resulting in the decline of Zynga and now the withdrawal by EA of its servers supporting Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.
- Despite the decline of social gaming, gaming remains a critical piece of the mobile ecosystem with users spending 32% of their time on smartphones playing games.
- This means to me that gaming is returning to its roots of individual applications with the option of online interaction through the ecosystem such as Game Center on iOS or xBox on Microsoft.
- If Facebook wants to get access to the gaming segment, as it attempts to extend its influence beyond social networking, it will need to create something like Game Center or xBox as social gaming looks to be a thing of the past.
- Of all the gaming offerings out there, it is Microsoft and Sony that have the real potential to command the mobile space but so far both of them have been ineffectual at doing so.
- Game Center from Apple also has potential but it is uncertain just how much value Apple derives from it or how many active users there currently are.
Blog Comments
tatilsever
April 16, 2013 at 7:19 pm
“Of all the gaming offerings out there, it is Microsoft and Sony that have the real potential to command the mobile space but so far both of them have been ineffectual at doing so.”
The curse of profits… 🙂 It is difficult to make decisions that might cannibalize a market where you get a good chunk of a game sold at $60 and move on to a realm where games cost mere dollars if that. What is more baffling is their lack of participation in the app economy. Being a developer for Xbox costs 100x more, and apparently SDK is not all that user friendly, putting up a big barrier to entry for developers who could contribute to the ecosystem, making the consoles more useful for a larger demographic.
tatilsever
April 16, 2013 at 7:27 pm
I am curious about how much income Sony and MS got out of casual gamers during Xbox360/PS3 era. More than a few of my friends have moved on to becoming casual gamers as they got older and got married, so their consoles are now gathering dust or used as streaming video boxes. For that purpose a pricey console is an overkill, making me think they are unlikely to buy into the next round of consoles. At the very least, they may not buy one of each, as they did during the last round. It is possible the younger generation may replenish the sales lost to that demographic, but if there were substantial numbers of casual gamers of any age who bought consoles in the past for lack of any alternatives, this round of consoles may not bring profits large enough to make up for the losses incurred while the hardware is sold at a loss. The “easy” solution is designing a console that does not cost more than the sales price, but I don’t know if expectations of hard core gamers can be met at such a price point.
If so, I guess the conundrum could be similar to the newspaper industry. As casual readers are lost to free internet sites, cost cutting measures reduce quality, turning off the hard core readers and creating a vicious cycle.
windsorr
April 17, 2013 at 11:34 am
Great points. I think what happens is a bifurcation of the market. The hard core gamers buy consoles and the causal gamers do not. certaintly I would expect casual gamers to buy consoles next time around unless there is a big media / ecosystem play also made on the back of it.