The other day, seven forecasts for the development of the mobile gaming market in the coming year appeared on the pages of the electronic version of Forbes. Their author is the founder and vice president of the marketing company W3i Robert Weber (Robert Weber). We decided to briefly bring them to us.
The first prediction
In recent years, as Weber writes, the mobile games industry has been experiencing a real “gold rush”. Following companies like Rovio and Imangi, who managed to create extremely profitable projects with small forces, the market was flooded with numerous teams and investor funds wishing to make money on it. In 2013, the “fever” will go down.
Funding for gaming startups will run out, deprived of financial resources, indie teams that have produced something before will switch to contract work. Together with the growing cost of attracting users, mobile games will become an extremely expensive enterprise for small teams. Low-performing gaming companies will be absorbed by stronger players.
The second prediction
With increased competition in the mobile gaming industry, games will become more expensive to make and produce. Reducing risks, developers will start developing sequels of already known projects, as well as actively buying up popular licenses.
The third prediction
It is very likely that interest in farms will decline. It will give way to gambling and more serious, hardcore genres.
The fourth prediction
Real multiplayer will appear on mobile platforms. In favor of this statement, Weber points to three factors at once: with the advent of asynchronous games like Draw Something, more and more players expect games to have multiplayer in them. Secondly, with the popularization of hardcore projects, it is unlikely that developers will resist the temptation to take up the creation of synchronous online entertainment in which users will be able to fight among themselves. Thirdly, reducing the cost of cloud storage of information will provide developers with an excellent opportunity for this.
The fifth prediction
Weber believes in Windows 8 as a gaming platform, despite numerous scandals of recent times and no fewer problems. After the update or release of Windows 9, according to the analyst, the situation with the platform will improve.
The sixth prediction
More and more companies are announcing that they are moving towards the mobile industry, the technical base of tablets is rapidly progressing, allowing them to already demonstrate graphics at the level of the first projects for the current generation of consoles. And at the same time, the turnover of the console market is declining against the background of the rapid growth of the mobile.
This allows Weber to say that to some extent tablets are killing consoles, although the analyst does not take into account many factors in his material. One of them is on the very surface: the current generation of consoles is long–lived. The Xbox 360 console was released in 2005, interest in it from the mass audience as a phenomenon has already faded, and the technical capabilities of the platform have long been seriously lagging behind the PC. At the same time, there is now an ideological crisis on consoles. As a result – a rapid drop in sales.
The seventh prediction
But the consoles will fight, as Weber himself writes. A year later, platform holders will announce the next generations of their consoles. However, in order to retain the market, they will have to position their products not just as game consoles, but as full-fledged entertainment complexes.