The study goes on to conclude that the $20 billion dollar PC gaming market, predicted to rise to $US34 billion by 2011, was bigger, worth more money, was growing faster and had better tech than the console market could provide. Okay then! PC gamers in one corner, console gamers in the other. Ready, fight!

Study Claims PC Market is the Largest [Edge]

Well, that’s all well and good, but a different gaggle of experts (Juniper Research, this time) are casting worried glances at the non-iPhone end of the market. Apparently Java game development has “flatlined across North America and Western Europe,” although the quoted jump from $US5.4 billion in 2008 to more than $US10 billion by 2013 doesn’t sound that flatliney.

Ironically, it could be the iPhone’s fault. “The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive,” said the report, “The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely”

Sales of mobile games have “flatlined” – report [GamesIndustry.biz]

The current market is estimated to be worth 4.43 billion yuan (around $US 645 million), and with no predicted slowdowns, one wonders what we’ll be seeing this time next year (or even fourth quarter of ‘08). And with companies like Perfect World making a foray into Western markets, we’ll just have to wait and see where China’s industry is heading long-term.

China market: 2Q08 online gaming services valued at 4.43 billion yuan [Digitimes via GamesIndustry.biz]

Prior to EA, Grey founded Heavy Iron, which was sold to THQ in 1999 and now serves as the primary studio creating the publisher’s Pixar tie-in titles. Before that, Grey directed Parasite Eve for Square, and ran EA’s software tools group and motion capture lab for the publisher during its original PlayStation era.

FerryGames says Grey will oversee not only its Secret Online franchise and upcoming expansion packs War of Heroes and Qin Warriors, but also its forthcoming casual products due summer 2009: the music, dance, catwalk and social network title codenamed Project Super, and massively online third person shooter codenamed X-Fire.

I’m personally very excited to see where the Chinese market is headed and how the gaming landscape is going to be changing over the next decade, both within China and on a more global scale. Little announcements like these aren’t terribly exciting on a small level, but when rolled into the total sum of how the industry is doing, do portend some interesting things …

FerryGames Gets EA’s Steve Grey, Announces Line-Up [Gamasutra]

I’ve suggested before that for the videogames industry, the mass market is our long tail. The centre of cashflow in videogames are the hobbyists, the players who buy and play many games over the course of each year. Even with the outrageous sales figures that a mass market game can rack up (tens of millions, versus the old familiar game styles that top out at a few million units at best), the mass market doesn’t look like an attractive option for most game developers: they don’t know how to develop for it, they don’t have a marketing spend big enough to skip over the hobbyists, and even if they made the perfect mass market product there’s every chance it would sink without a trace.

The change at Nintendo is apparent: games are only part of Nintendo’s focus now. What is less clear is what this change means for the rest of us. Because if this new wider market can only be hit by Nintendo first party software, which may be substantially the case, most developers would do better to continue to compete for a tiny share of a successful hobbyist marketplace, such as the first person shooter market, or the RPG market, even if most of the titles in these over-competed markets do fail miserably. And in that respect, the change in Nintendo is really ‘business as usual’ – because Nintendo’s problem has always been that it can make and sell its own ‘first party’ software in large numbers, but third party developers struggle to make a profit on a Nintendo platform.

It does suck to be left out in the cold, and that goes for many of us — even those of us who don’t have the time to game as we once did. Diversification isn’t a bad thing, but it can be troubling at times.

The Change at Nintendo [Only a Game]

Korean games (non-Japanese games in general, actually) tend to get a lot of flack — ‘They’re all the same!’ ‘They’re so badly made!’ ‘Just look at them!’ — but Brandon Sheffield cautions that we ought to be keeping a closer on eye on the Korean market. With different development strategies, different working environments, and different players, there is stuff to be learned from Korean companies taking steps to expand westward:

The fact is, Western developers have ignored, discounted, or simply not known about the South Korean market for far too long, and now we’re face to face with reality. Aside from World of Warcraft, they’ve taken a genre we invented, and perfected it to the point where an online dance game like T3 Entertainment’s Audition has tens of millions of subscribers worldwide.

That’s rather a lot of people, and we’re ignoring it. When I first noticed that company in 2002, they were making a game called Raphael that was so rudimentary as to almost be freeware.

Korea is starting to get more attention, but perhaps the most impressive thing is how well some Korean companies have done with their entrance into other markets — it’ll be interesting to see how the gaming landscape changes over the next couple of years.

Why You Should Care About Korea [GameSetWatch]

While some people argue that what games need is more monotony, at least in terms of black and white games, plenty of people are dissatisfied with the current trend of drabness in developers’ colour palettes. Of course, there are plenty of brightly coloured games that are and will continue to be released, but plenty of people miss colour. Bright colour. I myself am rather fond of candy-coloured palettes, preferring them to drab medieval “realism”. One blogger thinks he has the answer to who stole the colour from games:

… I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

I can appreciate muted palettes as much as anyone, but it’s nice to step into games that are so far removed from reality that the grass is always emerald and the sky is always some slightly unnatural colour of blue. Are teenage boys to blame? I don’t know about that, but there’s nothing wrong with prettily painted games. And you can be muted without being drab.

Who Stole All the Colours? [Quiet Babylon via GameSetWatch]