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Somewhat unfortunately rise of ‘Casual Gamer’ will probably lead to more simplistic games being released. While personally I would love to see depth of story and characters, there are a significant number of players out there who want to pick up a game for twenty minutes or so, have a bit of fun, and then put it down until another time. These gamers are generally less interested in latest greatest technology and more interested in a ‘fast food’ kind of entertainment that satisfies moment, despite lack of quality or lasting effects. Hopefully two game types can co-exist peacefully although recently it has been seen that some developers are cutting down on some of planned depth of a title in order to accommodate more casual gamer.
As technology pushes forwards boundaries are slowly being broken down between systems. We saw Bleemcast a few years back enabling running of Playstation games on Dreamcast, and PC is able to run almost anything given right emulation software. Consoles are able to emulate other consoles and new consoles are being announced that promise ability to play PC games. The Xbox 2 is reported to have a model in planning that comes in a PC case and with ability to run both PC software and Xbox software. Macs can emulate Windows software and vice-versa. We’ll probably start seeing less of a distinction between consoles and PCs as price of technology continues to drop and consoles continue to become more and more powerful and able to compete with more expensive computers. Ideally we’ll see a single platform come into prominence so that everything can be run without purchasing a copious number of different machines, although that does have a downside in that it can establish a monopoly for one particular company.
The technology price drop and increase in power has also lead to more powerful hand-held machines than before. Real games, not just simple toys are now available for portable market. The advent of PDAs and mobile phones with ability to play games raises awareness of portable gaming and new competitors are starting to get in on field that was once primarily dominated by Nintendo’s GameBoy. There is a new product, gp32, that can run many different emulators and hence, many different system’s games (including some PC games).
I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen but these are just a few ideas that I’ve had recently. Hopefully games industry will continue to strive towards new heights with new and interesting game play, stories, characters and ideas. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in next few years.
Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net