Last week, I attended the NY Games conference, where developers talked at lenght about the impact of digital distribution on the industry. The talk is spreading. The buzz building for the upcoming London Games Conference has a similar theme, reports Spong. Speakers are focused on what they call the "seismic shift" at play.
As Spong puts its: "...the conference speakers will reveal that 40 per cent of companies in the sector will also be 'under prepared' for the sheer pace of the digital model's takeover."
What does "under prepared" mean? We'll have to see. But most publishers are still operating under the old model of selling huge games on plastic discs. The future is heading toward the opposite - small games digitally delivered. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you think about it, some of the most played and enduring games require little bandwidth - Tetris, Scrabble, Bejeweled. The bigger games can still exist in this ecosytem, but need to be reinvented so that they can be consumed in bite-sized portions.
David Kushner is the author of many books, including Masters of Doom, Jonny Magic & the Card Shark Kids, Levittown, The Bones of Marianna, and Alligator Candy. A contributing editor of Rolling Stone, he has written for publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine.
