Comments on: Mobile Gaming – Return to roots

By: windsorr

windsorr — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:34:51 +0000

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.

By: tatilsever

tatilsever — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:27:15 +0000

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.

By: tatilsever

tatilsever — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:19:12 +0000

“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.