Versatile Amphibian

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...

My latest State of the Media Democracy B-Side covers gaming, which is mentioned in the report in a couple of areas, but definitely deserves a deeper dive. Having been an avid gamer since the days of the NES , it’s good to see that traditional gaming on consoles remains strong – nearly half of households now have one and 15% have connected it to the Internet. Console ownership has increased by about 20% year-on-year, which is pretty impressive given the less than perfect economic conditions and the considerable cost of the devices and their games. Purchasing through the console was surprisingly prevalent with 28% of people who had their console Internet connected saying that they purchased something through it at least once a month in 2011. Consoles are the simplest way for many households to connect their TV to the Internet, so people’s willingness to buy through them is a positive sign for the wider on-demand content industry. Only 3% bought or hired a movie in 2011 on the console th...