Mobile Gaming Won't Kill Off Video Game Consoles - Forbes

Mobile Gaming Won't Kill Off Video Game Consoles

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/08/04/mobile-gaming-wont-kill-off-the-video-game-consoles/

Too often, people mistake the rapid growth in mobile gaming as a sign of the console’s decline.

Lately we’ve been talking a lot about the rise of mobile gaming, the advent of the Ouya, and the future of the gaming space. Lots of doom-and-gloom predictions have been circling, with people going so far as to say that mobile gaming and upstarts like the Ouya might kill off the traditional console altogether.

Actually, some people are eagerly cheering this future, though I strongly believe this is not only not a likely future, but also not a good future for gaming. Eager or fearful, the predictions are wrong. The consoles isn’t going away any time soon.

First off, everyone is looking at this the wrong way. Too many people have this notion that there’s a fixed pie in the gaming space and that success in mobile will eat away at the consoles or render them irrelevant.

A fixed pie is the wrong way to approach this subject, however. If anything, the gaming market is simply growing across the board, and much of the stagnation we’re seeing in console gaming is simply because these consoles are in the twilight of their life-cycle.

Consoles aren’t selling as rapidly as they did in the past because quite a few people already own a console now, and quite a few more are holding off for next-gen.

Mobile Is Hot And Its Heating Up

Mobile, on the other hand, is growing  rapidly, and mobile and browser-based gaming has been evolving as rapidly as the market has grown ever since the iPhone debuted.

This growth makes mobile gaming attractive to investors and developers alike, but eventually it will stabilize just like traditional gaming has. The tech will continue to improve, but the market itself can’t grow this fast forever.

Furthermore, there’s no indication that mobile is growing at the expense of more traditional gaming or that casual games are crowding out more “hardcore” titles. Outside of anecdotes about some sequels being “dumbed down” for broader audiences, the market as a whole still has plenty of AAA titles, difficult games, and so forth.

Instead of looking at mobile as a threat to consoles, we should see it as a possible stepping stone for casual gamers leading toward more investment in the deeper experience of console and PC gaming.

People who enjoy consoles aren’t leaving that space for greener pastures in mobile, but plenty of people who never played console games to begin with are downloading gaming apps on their smartphones.

Of course, all this growth means companies like Apple and innovators like Ouya could really stake a claim in the wider gaming market. Whether that actually poses a threat to hardcore gaming and video game consoles is hardly a certainty.

Learning The Right Lessons

This is also why I think publishers should probably be a bit wary of adopting a F2P model too quickly. What works in the Asian market, in the MMORPG genre, and on mobile may not work nearly as well on consoles or in non-multiplayer settings.

In the meantime, mobile games really are getting better.

Take SoulCraft (pictured above) – a free-to-play top-down action-RPG similar to Diablo. It’s a fun game with impressive graphics and mechanics. But it’s also uniquely mobile. For most gamers who enjoy traditional consoles, no amount of improvements to mobile gaming will change this fact.