At the Engage! conference last week Trip Hawkins brought up some interesting points during the keynote, namely that the audience for real time entertainment is growing and in new ways.
Trip Hawkins, CEO of mobile game developer Digital Chocolate and a founder of gaming behemoth Electronic Arts. Hawkins echoed many of Liew”s sentiments. “We’re going from 100 million gamers, to a billion or more,” he said. “These are not the people who are playing Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.”
Interesting enough, the number of hardcore gamer seems to be shrinking.
Hawkins went a step further than Liew to say that hardcore gamers’ habits would actually become less “hardcore” as more and more of their friends migrated to the casual gaming model. “If you don”t count the Wii and you don’t count Guitar Hero, spending on hardcore console gaming is trending way down,” he said. With casual and social gaming fast becoming the most common gaming experience, more and more hardcore gamers would be swept up in that flow, Hawkins said.
What that sounds like to me is the growth and evolution of the audience, an audience looking for something new. I’m hoping that new is more along the lines of movies where story takes precedence over the gameplay. Nothing wrong with games, just be good to see the medium for real time story expand. There was a time when all Hollywood would produce was Westerns, then it was musicals. Today Hollywood caters to nearly every niche, maybe we’ll see a similar expansion with real time story.
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Hardcore gaming is not doing too well. It's going down.
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