Versatile Amphibian

I was lucky enough to attend this year’s Royal Television Society Conference at the Barbican and am in the process of sharing my notes from the event. This is number 3 in the series. Having heard about the Olympic Games in the morning, the first afternoon session at RTS focused on games with a small “g”. The panel discussion was hosted by Ed Vaizey – Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Vaizey has the odd punchy one-liner, but it strikes me that he knows little about the sector besides an obviously poor quality briefing before the session. I doubt that he plays games or watches much TV, for that matter. The rest of the panel consisted of Sefton Hill, from Rocksteady Studios, Steven Moffat – the writer of Doctor Who and Merlin, no less - and Henrique Olifiers of Bossa Studios. Console gaming and TV The panel discussion was rather rambling. These notes therefore pick out the recognisable subjects rather than attempting to be comprehensive. [The first thing ...

I was lucky enough to be asked to facilitate the gaming panel at the London Business School’s Tech Media Summit on Friday. I say lucky, as the panellists were an excellent group with a lot of strong opinions about the future of the gaming industry. Since the discussion was so rich, I thought I’d share my three biggest takeaways from the session* HD gaming is the new console gaming... but it’s going to remain a (profitable) niche Basically, console gaming is here to stay, but it will remain a relatively niche activity, compared to casual games. I found it interesting that EA now refer to the console as “HD” gaming. This makes total sense. The way I like to think about the industry is analogous to the moving picture industries. Console games are like movies (PC games are like arthouse movies) and social games are more like TV shows. In more detail, although movies have the massive budgets and huge total audience draw, there are very few made in a year and they actually make up only a sm...