Yeah you will essentially get most titles (even tripleA) on a phone/tablet or from the “cloud”. So dedicated consoles might not be that appealing.

Even the newer WP and Ubuntu-phone/touch are targeting this converged vision where phones will basically do it almost everything big clunky power-hungry dedicated devices are now doing.

As am looking at my phone it makes perfect sense, I just want to dock it and get that experience

Also the graphics are reaching a point where they are just “perfectly good enough movie-like experience” for the human eye. Like 2d is just “good enough” already, 3d will soon be. Just look at those UE4 real time demos. I don’t think you can make too big of an improvement over that… So is time to start shrinking that hardware and make it portable.

And good 3D graphics are just too common these days (be it in movies or their consoles), so people don’t fuss that much about them anymore and even if your indie game is classic style 2d or 2.5d it can be very popular as they once used to be.

Anyway, I still think there will exist some type of dedicated hardware or pre-built box (like ouya and the steambox) which are looking to be more open and affordable.

http://youtu.be/7RDM-IvrTD0

The short version of my experience is the run-time side was easy and fun. The hard stuff was dealing with all the data. Even with just my simple demo. Can only imagine what it would be like for a full game.

The tech has been around for a while now. Are any other game studios doing anything similar?

I would also add dumbing down to the ‘playing’ section. As a single-player first-person shooter fan I feel I haven’t played a decent one since Half Life 2, and even that can’t compete with the first installment.

Buying Battlefield 3 recently is probably the final straw for me. I know it is primarily a multi-player game but they have obviously spent a great deal of time and money on the single player portion. The result is yet another bad experience. Apart from the dismal length of around 6-7 hours, every few minutes the control is ripped from you to shove another set-piece unskippable cutscene in your face. It was never needed before to have a good experience and doesn’t work now. I don’t mind cutscenes at all between levels, just not in the middle of the action.

The cause I think is producers who think they are movie directors. And us players are just pesky things who get in the way of them telling us their cliche-ridden tale.

I have some hope in Thief 3 still though. But as it has been a couple of years in development now and still no sign of any output I’m guessing it is going the same way.

I also won’t buy DLC or play freemium titles. I do buy expansions though, where the original game was self-contained and complete by itself.

Dan

Sure you have micro-transactions and in-game item sales, but that also requires that you build enough gameplay (potentially hundreds of hours of free game) for them to stay long enough to want to pay even $1 for some hat or a new skin on their character.

I’m guessing you are a developer so I’m sure you know that 100 hours of gameplay is not exactly 100 hours of development time, more like 100x more. So who is going to pay for the 100 hours of gameplay in hopes to earn $1 from a handful of people? I know Freemium models work, I’m not arguing that. But that model requires huge capital to give away a game after paying for development and waiting to earn it back (maybe) $1 at a time…

Is that the right model for a struggling indie? If free is the only path of the future, who will have pockets deep enough to survive when EVERYONE is free and that gimmick is no longer unique? What will happen when it’s not enough to just say, “hey we are free, try me!” Do we sink even more money to try and create a higher quality game? At what point is free going to break?

I see the trend definetily going towards free games with buyable Content.

The only way to combat the script-kiddies is to create higher production games (more $) or a “new flavor of gum” every year to stay one step ahead.

It’s possible, but game developers will simply have to work much harder and expect less than any industry to make that happen.