I found the following by Will Wright to be spot on. The highlights are mine.
Will Wright knows a thing or two about emerging genres. He's the creator of games such as The Sims and SimCity, which launched new categories in video games. Social gaming is today's category that is experiencing surprisingly explosive growth. Wright acknowledges the quick rise of the sector, but is reluctant to say that the growth will continue indefinitely, noting past trends.
"I think [social gaming] is going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world," he told IndustryGamers. "People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that."
He added, "There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum."
"So right now we’re at the steep of that curve," he said. "If you extrapolate that out, it looks like 'Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in five years,' but of course the curve never stays that steep."
Via:
worldsinmotion.biz
IG: Yeah, I think one thing the industry really has to capitalize on is the whole shift to digital distribution; it's a challenge but it also presents a real opportunity. If you look at how the music industry handled that, they pretty much failed, as they were taken by surprise by all this and CD sales went way, way down as all the music was basically pirated online. So right now there’s a lot of talk about the transition to digital and you also have streaming services like OnLive and Gaikai from David Perry. How crucial will that transition be for the industry? What’s your take on the whole transition?
WW: Well, with the distribution issue… we kind of saw it coming. It was one of those things where we talked about it, talked about it, and now it’s finally happening. That happens frequently with these technologies – people talk about it for 7 years, and then it happens. But I think games are in some ways fundamentally different, in the fact that they’re malleable, that people can create their content, that they can build very strong interactive community experiences around them, and that means that having them over some kind of network, with ongoing digital assets and things being traded, really adds to the value of a game, much more than it does to, let's say, a movie or a book. So I think that’s gonna be the really critical factor, is the fact that games are a world that’s build for a network world, as opposed to something where we all sit in the same theater and see the same movie. And they were built to be potentially more user centered, more collaborative…you’ve got user generated content, user communities, mods, all that stuff, and I think that is really gonna be the defining factor. This is something games have been doing for quite a while, but it’s really accelerating. But it’s something with games that's basically going to be their rocket assist relative to other media.
IG: What impact do you believe Project Natal or PlayStation Move will have when they launch this year? Do you think they’ll have a similar impact to the Wii itself or will it be more muted?
WW: I doubt they’ll have the same impact the Wii had. In some sense, they feel like evolutions, or evolutionary technologies. I think Natal feels like a better EyeToy, which is going to have some interesting applications. I don’t think it’s going to change the face of gaming or anything. I think that having motion control, like in a Wii controller, is something that both Microsoft and Sony are catching up to, but again it almost suggests certain toy-like applications. I’m not sure I’d want to use a Wii controller for a first-person shooter. Even as obvious as this might sound to you, you want to point something at the screen when you’re shooting, but just the precision of the technology is below the precision I would get with a mouse on a PC, for instance. That’s something that Nintendo has always been very, very good at... in some sense when they design something, they work from the controller outwards and they may show the kinesthetic second to second experience with the control scheme is first and foremost when they work on a new game. The feel of Mario jumping has to be just right, and then they base the rest of the game around that.
IG: The thing that interests me is that it’s almost as if Microsoft and Sony are trying to capture that audience that is familiar with the Wii and they’re hedging their bets that maybe some of these Wii owners will actually upgrade. As you said, it almost feels like an evolution of the Wii controls, so they’re hoping that some of these people will actually upgrade from a Wii to an Xbox 360 or to a PS3 to check that out. Do you see that actually happening? I think the more casual audience might not want to spend that money.
WW: I think at some point it becomes the feature that a lot of people enjoy and they value it, so now it becomes just something on the list they have to check off. Do you have online capabilities? Check. Do you motion control? Check. So I think that Nintendo has basically ratcheted up what’s expected in a modern gaming platform, and now Sony and Microsoft basically feel like they have to add that to their checklist.
via:
industrygamers.com
Still in Alpha, and early development I am amazed at the progress realXtend Taiga server and Naali viewer developers continue to make and their cooperation with OpenSim developers.
