The Best 26-Minute Argument That Game Consoles Are Dying


Ben Cousins, who works for a company called ngmoco that makes video games mostly for mobile phones and tablets, has a vested interest in telling you that PlayStations, Xboxes and Nintendo Whatevers are a few pistons away from horse-and-buggy obsolescence.

It would be so easy to dismiss him, because game consoles are such impressive and entertaining machines.

Game consoles helped slay the arcades. Some stupid Apple machine is going to squash them?

Come on.

Before you dismiss Cousins as a mobile gaming shill or before you nominate him as a prophet, clear 26 minutes from your schedule. Use those 26 minutes to watch and listen to a presentation, embedded below, of Cousins’ talk from last week’s Game Developers Conference.

It was the most provocative talk I attended at GDC.

I loved it (points for praising Kotaku, Ben!).

Cousins is on to something. He’s got enough evidence to support many of his assertions: Console companies are struggling. Game sales on consoles are slumping. Tablets and phones are swelling in power. People are playing video games away from their consoles like they haven’t since the days when arcades were waiting to defeated by the Nintendo Entertainment System and PlayStation.

Has Ben Cousins seen the future? He just might be showing it to you.

26 minutes. Give him that.


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