The ‘AAA’ console market is alive and well one week, then the next it’s dead in the water! What are we supposed to believe? Are we supposed to think for ourselves or something?! Now Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Sim City and Spore has spoken out about some of the issues facing the games industry — according to him “console guys” are running scare.
“I think publishers are much more risk-averse to spending twenty or thirty million dollars on a title,” he said, speaking to Games Industry International. “The only people who could really play that game were giant publishers, and they’d be rolling the dice. They’d do 5 titles a year, and all they had to do was get one hit and it paid off all the failures. It is going to be more of a Zynga-type environment where people start small and try to grow it up. It encourages experimentation. I think before the only thing people were willing to bet on were sequels; that was really the only predictable genre. Now the fact that you can do a game for an extremely low cost, put it out there and see if it gets any traction is going to encourage more diversity.”
These shifting business models, according to Wright, make things a little more difficult for the console market.
“I think all the console guys are running scared,” he said. “Not so much because of the hardware, but because of the business models, free-to-play and that kind of thing, have shifted underneath them.”
Will Wright: “Console guys are running scared” [GamesIndustry International]
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