Artsygamer

Exciting news, my friends, the future is closer than I thought: playing without the need of a PC or even console… streaming on your TV. Why do I think stuff like this is very exciting? Well, with a monthly subscription one could try as many games as they wanted, play as much as they want, and hopefully even regardless of platform. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wondering how they’ll go about certain specialized controllers though… and of course hoping they’ll get prices affordable for everybody so finally games can move on to the mainstream like tv.

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A bit of spooky history today, with the help of the ever so kind Wikipedia article on the subject. First it’s causes:

 

• The second generation of consoles was the first to be sustained by large libraries of interchangeable software. Interest in consoles has historically sagged after 5 years, and in 1983, Atari’s market leader, the 2600, was celebrating its fifth birthday. Without established precedent, the industry was not prepared to take consoles to the next generation, and the long-term delay of Atari’s own 7800 consoles left it with little to captivate consumers hunger for the next big thing.
• A flood of consoles on the US market, giving consumers too many choices. At the time of the US crash, there was a plethora of consoles on the market: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Bally Astrocade, ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Emerson Arcadia 2001, Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision (and its just-released update with several peripherals, Intellivision II), Sears Tele-Games systems (which included 2600 and Intellivision clones), Tandyvision, VTech CreatiVision, and Vectrex. Each one of these consoles had its own library of games, and many had (in some cases large) third-party libraries. Likewise, many of these same companies announced yet another generation of consoles for 1984, such as the Odyssey3, and Atari 7800.^[1]
• A flood of poor titles from hastily financed startups, combined with weak high-profile Atari 2600 games such as the game based on the hit movie ET and an infamous port of the popular arcade game Pac-Man. These games were also notoriously overproduced.
• The news media sensationalized both the boom days of 1980 and the problems of 1982–83. In particular, the story of Atari burying millions of ET cartridges in a New Mexico landfill^[2] shifted the outlook of the video game market in the eyes of many media outlets.

Seems to me I see some similarities to today. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t happen again, especially these days when with the explosion of casual games and big profits from small games, so many publishers are turning towards low budget simple games…
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gamesindustry.biz has a very interesting article on in-game advertising featuring Google AdSense for Games’ Bernie Stolar, promissing that it will become a billion dollar industry by 2010.

‘If you look at research, there are more people playing games than watching television. So what does that tell you? That tells you there’s a whole different audience," Stolar said.

The demographics have changed. So the rules have changed.

A lot of gamers are very scared by things like this, but I believe it will be a very natural placement. It’s already started, but it should go everywhere IMO: the hero is drinking his last can of brand soda in a dramatic moment before parachuting into enemy territory, you drive by some billboards with real advertisments, you listen to a radio featuring real advertisments slightly tweaked for the game, brand name cars, you shoot your way through hallways with posters… the possibilities are pretty much endless. Maybe even more importantly though, games will be able to cost less, finally closing the gap between the high price of gaming and the free-ness of television.
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Once upon a time “video killed the radio star”… i don’t think games will kill of movies, because people like seeing people as stars, but it does count where the money is going, regardless of what the words say. www.kcci.com has an interesting article on this.

This is also going to be a record year for the film industry, with the Hollywood Reporter projecting that box office sales will top $10 billion.

In the meanwhile:

“We’re forecasting a real record-breaker (for) 2007 sales of approximately $18 billion in the U.S.,” said David Riley of NDP, a market research company.

Head on over to kcci.com for a full read.

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