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Radioactive IT GCAP08: Future trends in games – bye-bye hard-core?
Radioactive IT GCAP08: Future trends in games – bye-bye hard-core? | GCAP08: Future trends in games – bye-bye hard-core? |
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| Radioactive IT - Gaming and Entertainment tech blog | |
| by Mike Bantick | |
| Saturday, 22 November 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Haggerty takes a different, almost contradictory tack for the rest of her presentation. Pointing out the shift of demographic with such figures as the 141 percent increase in “family” games over the past year, as well as the phenomenal sales in hand-held devices such as the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. Without actually saying it, Haggerty has indicated that the growth of the games industry rides high on the new demographic of family and mobile style games. Evan Spytma, Channel Marketing Manager for PopCap games in Asia Pacific was more than happy to pick up on these types of themes during his “Not So Casual Anymore” session. Whilst the company that brought the hugely successful Bejewled to the world is happy in its market space of easy to play, addictive extreme cross platform games (from in-flight offerings to lottery tickets, to PC and consoles), Spytma believes other companies could do worse than adopt the PopCap game delivery model. PopCap have analysed the demographic for their games in some detail, with Spytma telling the audience that 71 percent of PopCap customers are older than 35, 60 percent are female, 52 percent play over five hours per week and the majority (72 percent) simply play to relieve stress. Taking the audience through a typical development cycle, which refreshingly allows the development team time to give the product real polish before release, yet is very short compared to the sophisticated titles of other companies. Usually a year sees the game travel from initial concept to release ready. When quizzed Spytma could not find a PopCap example of a project that had not hit any sales brick walls, citing only AstroPop as not as successful as it could have been. Spytma blaming the fact that the game actually employed a two click control mechanism instead of the usual single click controls of the majority of PopCap offerings. Spytma used his session to urge other companies to explore new methods of pay-for-play and when designing ‘..ask yourself, do you really need that extra button? Look at games with a ‘casual filter’ on.” Concluded on PAGE 3 |
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