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With the launch of the new generation of consoles just around the corner I have been wondering a lot about where the next generation of titles will take us. As is so often the case, the screenshots that are being released are amazing, fantastic, and utterly mundane, all at the same time. Today I saw a couple of the screenshots for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter over at Matt Sarrel's site, and it looks beautiful, but after several decades of gaming, I have come to expect huge graphic leaps. Even though I appreciate that the next generation of consoles are going to probably blow me away, I'm starting to wonder which of the console makers is going to wise up first and realize that there is a huge untapped market that costs them very little and allows for huge potential revenue.
The market I'm talking about it the casual games market. Right now a lot of people are making good money in casual games, and the number of talented developers grows daily. In fact, I highly recommend you read the article "Casual Fortunes" over at Escapist Magazine, it really sheds new light on the booming casual games market.
Instead of spending money to find ways to encourage and nurture this market, all of the big three seem to be intent on squashing it. Take for example the recent release of the 2.0 upgrade for the PSP. This upgrade introduced some great new features such as a web browser, the ability to share photos, custom backgrounds, and the like. It also completely reworked the security so that no homebrew titles would work on the system. Now, I fully understand that the primary reason for this is that they don't want you playing Bionic Commando on your PSP, or any other emulated game for that matter, but the fact still remains that the security update killed the good with the bad. It seems to me that if Sony could work out a system by which casual games could be delivered to your PSP it wouldn't cut into the sales of the big titles at all. I can honestly say that while I will research a game purchase in the $70 range, I won't think twice about dropping $10 or $15 on a game that I barely know anything about.
If I were Sony I'd be looking at making a version of the Macromedia Flash player that ran like a dream on the PSP. I'd then create a games portal like MiniClip and pay budding young developers peanuts for their games while rolling around in fat sacks of ill-gotten loot. Oh, and also, if I were Sony, I'd buy myself a monkey and then hire someone to clean up after it. Lets face it, while I'm being Sony I should do something for me.
Okay, I got a little off track there. Basically "peanuts" for a game is still big money for an independent developer. For example, if I take 50% of the revenue from an Indie game, and it sells 20,000 copies at $10 a piece, I'm still making a hundred thousand dollars for me, Sony, and the developer gets the same fat paycheque for a game that may only have taken two months to develop. Hell, with PayPal supporting micropayments now, you could sell the whole game for $2 and you'd probably get 100,000 out there in no time. You'd make the exact same money, but more people would get to enjoy your game, and isn't that what it's really all about? Ummmm, isn't it?
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