Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Article: A Completely Roundabout Way of Discussing the Future of Game Development


My first article for this blog was about making sound important.  In it, I discussed several ways to integrate sound into gameplay so it wasn't just there for ambience and immersion that could be muted, but made necessary to complete the game.

Now I would like to take a step back and think about the likelihood of sound ever becoming that important.

Pong
I swear I'll get to the future of games eventually.  Get some popcorn.
When I think of watching a movie, there are a few types of movie-watching experiences.  One is when I take the movie seriously, pay close attention, turn off the lights, sit in the glory of surround sound, and forget about the rest of the world.  Another way to watch a movie is to riff on it as you watch it, and this is usually reserved for bad movies or B-movies.  The lights don't need to be off, and for all it matters, the sound could be mono.  Of course, sound is still necessary, but it takes a back seat to the voices of the viewers who want to joke about it.

These two movie-watching experiences have analogs in games.  Getting soaked into the world and eliminating distractions is often the case for hardcore gamers.  The sound is up so you can catch every piece of dialogue, so you can hear your enemies sneaking up on you, so you can hear to your teammates talk to you.  When you are interrupted by the rest of life butting in, you get frustrated.

Sound doesn't matter so much--or at all--in casual and mobile games.  You might be listening to your own music, or you might be multitasking, and sound becomes a distraction.  You might need to pay attention to the person in the room with you, or maybe you're listening to the news on TV.  An interruption from something else doesn't matter, because you aren't 100% focused on the game anyway.

In these instances, sound becomes detached from the game completely.  Even when I play hardcore games, like MMOs, I will often have the sound muted, and I will be playing in a window that only takes up half the screen, so I can watch YouTube videos at the same time.

We live in a world of multitasking, and it's difficult to push everything else away to do one thing, like watch a movie or play a game with undivided attention.  We still can do that, but with the increase in mobile game platforms slowly becoming the norm (and will soon take over hardcore gaming in revenue), dedicated playtime will be tougher to manage.  If you want to experience games in the serious, undivided way, you may have to have a room dedicated to games, or perhaps one that doubles as a home theater for movies.

In order for sound to matter in games in the way I suggested in my first article, this kind of dedication is important.  And if consoles continue to have as big a presence as they do today, that will probably happen.

But the slow uprising in mobile and casual means that more game developers will dip their toes in those markets--even developers who traditionally make hardcore games.  If they find there is truly more money to be made in casual, they will swing that way, and leave hardcore gamers in the dust.

Angry Birds
Meet your new avian overlords.
On the other hand, indie gaming is becoming bigger and bigger.  Now, currently indie studios make the low-tech games, because they are low-cost as well.  Indie is big on 2D, old-style platformers, for instance, which bring back the nostalgia of older gaming eras, and remind us that just because the industry has moved on, that doesn't mean there isn't any innovation to be found in older game genres.

But with the lowering cost of technology and game development software, indie companies will soon (5 years to put a random number on it) be able to make games of today's industry standards of quality with fewer people, more cheaply.  There may then be a shift of hardcore gamers from playing big studio releases to playing games by indie studios, while the giants of game development shift focus to the wider swath of casual and mobile gamers.  As usual, companies follow the money, indies do what they love.

But if the big companies shift from hardcore to casual, that includes the hardware manufacturers.  Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo may stop making consoles--or, at least, they will stop marketing them that way.  An Xbox 360 currently does roughly ten bajillion more things than just play games.  The next Xbox (or Durango, as it is codenamed) will do more, and probably won't even be marketed as a gaming device so it can get wider appeal.  While it will play games, that will be a side-feature to how it interacts with your TV, smartphone, PC, and other devices in your home.  It will probably still offer a XBLA-style service for indies to show off their stuff, and major game developers will continue to make hardcore games for it (though probably downloadable and discless), but the generation of consoles after that?

Holodeck
Something like that.
Consoles like the Ouya will pick up the slack.  Now we're seeing the rise of the indie console, and the next generation indie console after the Ouya will probably have top-shelf capabilities, and it will be the place where indie companies can make hardcore games, to make up for the loss of Big Developer's switch to casual and mobile.

It'll make an interesting sea-change, but I think indies will rise in prominence and the age of big developers will wind down.

Well, at least until we get holodecks, I'm sure.  Then sound will probably be important again.

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