A Look at the Gaming Industry: Hold the Panic
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GigaOm recently ran an article about the video game business suffering a “crisis of attention.” Are people really less interested in video games these days? Is it truly a dying industry? Will video games eventually become, well, irrelevant? Or is it more a matter of perspective?
I’ll be examining the article’s arguments in just a bit. But before I do, there are a few things worth keeping in mind. First of all, the media is particularly fond of declaring crises, and the video game industry seems to be a favorite target.
As an example of this, a little over three years ago, Forbes ran an article by Reuters about how the industry was suffering from a “crisis of creativity.” It lamented that the video game industry was “facing a hardening of the creative arteries” because aging gamers preferred sequels of earlier games and games based on movies. With the high up-front costs of creating new games, few companies were willing to take risks.
Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, injected some perspective into the Reuters article at the end, drawing on his 20 years of experience in the industry. He said that he’d seen this phenomenon before, and that revolutionary new games came out every two to three years. “It’s difficult right now, but I expect to see a recovery in a couple of years,” he explained.
Then there’s the ongoing crisis of violence in video games. Do a Google search on the term “video game violence” (without the quotation marks) and you’ll get close to six and a half million hits. One of the most recent ones at the time of this writing talks about two bills being discussed in New York’s State Assembly and Senate with the goal of limiting children’s exposure to video game violence.
So with the “crisis of creativity” and “crisis of violence” in the video game industry, one has to wonder whether or not this crisis of attention is real. Would legislators be concerned about a crisis of violence in this industry if no one was paying attention to video games? In fact, by some accounts the gaming industry seems to be as strong as ever. Nintendo’s Wii has made a major splash, by attracting not only the usual suspects, but people who have never gamed before or who are more interested in casual or less violent games. So what is going on here?
Next: A Matter of Perspective >>
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