[Causal] [Online] Games in 2012

A Look Back at the Last Five Years

 
As part of my preparation for my talk in Seattle next month I will use this space to speculate a bit on what the games industry will look like in the year of 2012.  To start here is a background of the status of the larger entertainment industry:

 
Piracy Ubiquitous - Consumer copying of all linear digital product content will be so common that the word piracy will no longer be associated with the act of copying a movie, a sound track or a game.

 
5% Mobile Payments – Throughout North America, Europe, East Asia and South East Asia consumers and merchants will be able to exchange services and goods with a very low payment transaction fee of just 5%

 
10% North American Pre-Paid cards – Two companies will emerge as the leaders in cash payments for online commerce in the form of pre-paid cards all across NA with an incredibly low transaction fee (10%) with $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations.

 
PS3 fades- Sony exits the hardware console business and downsizes its game division to concentrate on its best IP lines

 
Nintendo scores again – in 2012 Nintendo remains dominate world-wide in both the hand-held and the console market by creating very low-cost hardware and depending on their own internally developed titles for success.

 
Xbox 360 is upgraded – continuously enjoys upgrades and enhancements to the hardware, including new graphics modules,\; however no wholesale replacement from MS happens.  Rather the Xbox and Live anywhere fuse to create a ‘software console’ – MS licenses this operating system to 3^rd parties to create their own console boxes.  This box ends up being the dominant box connected to the TV due to the low (no?) royalties for the OS MS imposes on 3^rd parties.

 
Broadcast TV is Irrelevant – Broadcast TV and even traditional cable is nearly irrelevant and instead linear content creators and the major TV and Movie houses work over time to re-invent the formatting of their work so that the service of viewing the material at their sites on the net is more compelling than pirating the DVD.

 
Friends create Channels – in short it will be your trusted friends that create the channels that you end up watching every day.  Smarter and smarter agents, widgets and gadgets will have been created that make TiVo look like a dumb rock.  Continuously updated feeds of all sorts of content is dynamically built into channels of internet with many sorts of peer rating and sorting (super advanced Diggs-style).

 
Micro-Payments turn Real – Ultra-small payments less than 0.0001 cents were pioneered in closed MMO economies… Now the largest of these MMO world systems have opened up their economy via various APIs to allow the greater internet access to giving ‘kudos’ and thanks to people to contribute small bits of IP from FAQs, and How-TOs to bits of user-art to jokes and lists.  These Kudos in turn can be surprisingly rapid in their accumulation and now there are many people leading successful careers off of these Kudus currencies.  

 Cheers,

-Erik