Angry Birds Exec Says Console Games Are Dying

RedEaredSlider writes "Angry Birds marketing lead Peter Vesterbacka went on the offensive today against his console counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by companies like Nintendo is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the South by Southwest Interact conference in Austin, Texas, Vesterbacka said that innovation wasn't coming from large development firms like EA and Ubisoft, but from smaller, more nimble developers like his own. Vesterbacka also pointed to the major concern over the price model for console games. Compared to mobile titles like Angry Birds that run for 99 cents, games on large consoles hover around fifty dollars. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for mobile games had yet to be completely figured out."

Comments

News at 11

[Pento]

Executive of company that produces games for one platform says that another platform is old hat, and will die out.

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Re:News at 11

[JimboG]

I think the point may have been the business model was old hat, not the platform. Small payments for less content. I don't agree however.

Re:News at 11

[Seumas]

Well, everyone knows that the tens of millions of real gamers out there are about to throw out their high resolution beefy PC gaming and 65" 1080p gaming to play rip-offs of 30 year old Scorched Earth / Tanks / Etc games and very minimal and lacking versions of sim and god games on a 320x200 flash/html5 interface on a social network web page!

Now, is it likely that there will be more of these casual/social gamers who spend all of their time playing these idiotic "recruit your friends to improve in the game!" pyramid schemes on very rudimentary and simple games than there are who play "real" video games? Absolutely. The same way there are more people that listen to Britney Spears than will ever listen to, say, Tom Wait. But that doesn't mean that one market is dumped and ignored in favor of the other. There will be a huge market for free or cheap casual games that you can play on the bus on your way to your job answering phones at the dentist's office or while you're waiting for your kids to finish soccer practice. And there will be a big market for involved, innovative, complex, competitive "traditional" gaming that the rest of us enjoy.

Re:News at 11

[Chewbacon]

Fail. It's on Windows, Mac OS, PS3, PSP. If you're not throwing mobile phones into one platform, then you could ad android, WebOS, and a couple others to that.

Re:News at 11

[MoonBuggy]

I do think it might turn up the pressure on the old business model a bit (which is probably a good thing, IMO). You'll always be able to justify spending $50 for the amount of entertainment that something like Fallout gives, but when decent games start popping up for very little cash, you think twice about dropping that much on some slightly updated sports game. Back when there was no such thing as a $1 game, even the crappy ones seemed better value at full price. The biggest potential risk, I think, is the market swinging too far the other way and making big-budget epics untenable, in the same way that cheap reality TV is detracting from more expensive but higher quality shows.

Re:News at 11

[c0lo]

And there will be a big market for involved, innovative, complex, competitive "traditional" gaming that the rest of us enjoy.

Name one game coming from EA/UbiSoft in the last 2 years that is still innovative.
'Cause that's what TFA is accusing: any new release of a "traditional game" is just "news at 11".

Re:News at 11

[shadowfaxcrx]

The only place he might have a point is not that demand for real games will go down, but that production of them will. If I can spend a week coding a Farmville clone, and make millions, vs paying a team of game designers and programmers for a year to develop a game and make millions, I'm gonna make FarmvilleClone. The profit margin is that much higher.

We've already seen it happen in TV with the explosion of reality shows. They're crap, every last one of them, but they're all over the place. Even Big Brother kept being renewed despite the first season having ratings somewhere south of the sub-basement. Why? Because even with crap ratings, they made more money on it than they would have from a traditional scripted show.

It's all about profits and profit margins. Quality will always take a back seat to money, and if you can manage to convince a gillion people to play your stupid little incessant-click game, you get rich a lot faster than the company who spends all that time making something good.

Re:News at 11

[somersault]

Brutal Legend.

Also, Scott Pilgrim vs The World was modelled after a very pixellated Double Dragon style 80s side-scrolling beat'em'up. Amazing 8 bit soundtrack by Anamanaguchi too. In today's world, you could call that innovative.

It's hardly like Angry Birds or Plant vs Zombies were innovative. The only difference is that they're on a touchscreen mobile device instead of being 00s flash games or 90s shareware.

Re:News at 11

[somersault]

Which part exactly do you have a problem with? The generic soccer mom stereotype was perhaps a bit much, but the rest is all true. Those of us that have seen games improve since the 70s and 80s don't really appreciate the steps backwards that are being caused by those who suddenly have noticed that computer games can be fun. The thing is that most of these people suck at games though, and won't enjoy anything remotely complex. I saw an interview with a World of Goo creator who said that the comments pages of mobile versions of the game were filled with morons who ask incredibly dumb questions that never get asked by people using the PC and console versions. They even added a "skip level" button for those that can't be bothered to actually play the game.

Re:News at 11

[hairyfeet]

I think what is actually happening isn't that hardcore gamers are playing (or even give a shit) about casual game but instead large numbers of females who never played are suddenly discovering gaming thanks to FB and are finding out not all games involve giant explosions and huge battles (only the best ones like Just Cause 2 IMHO).

Take my GF for example. She would watch me play something like FEAR or Bioshock and go "Oh I don't see how you can stand that, it's too scary!" but since finding games like Farmville on FB she has seen there is plenty of games out there that don't require twitch reflexes or having the latest hardware. Now she thinks she is ready to move up a little so this weekend I'll be bringing her an old FX5200 out of the junk pile and the first CSI game. If she enjoys that and wants to go higher then I'll slowly build her her own gaming PC

So I don't think it is so much a revolution or any changing of the way we game, it is simply that there are tons of women out there that have never spent a dime on games suddenly finding out there are games that they can enjoy as much as we do shooters. Hell even my 68 year old mom is playing those little murder mystery games now, and she hadn't played (or bought) a single game since Age Of Empires I back in 96.

I think they have simply stumbled over the right formula to make "chick games" and like chick flicks they can make serious money. I doubt it'll change the shooters and RPGers any, although the price does need to come down. $50 in a recession? That is just nuts. Now I do nearly all my shopping on Steam and Amazon and rarely pay more than $20 for a game. $50 for a single game is just too damned high. hey maybe we need a "games are too damned high" party?

Re:News at 11

[murdocj]

OK, something you need to understand: person who doesn't know what you know != moron.

Re:News at 11

[ijakings]

There ARE other games companies out there. Since youve asked for one game ill give you one, Portal.

Re:News at 11

[dzfoo]

>> Before there were consoles or handhelds, there was only PC gaming.

The above comment is inaccurate and makes the rest of your post suspect.

Consoles were there in the 70s and early 80s, then "died" (or went through a protracted "dry spell," as you say), then came back during the late 80s, just in time for PCs to finally not suck and start competing.

Unless you are including microcomputers under the "PC" label (which is a stretch, to say the least), such as the Apple II and the Commodore 64. Oh wait, the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision were already entrenched in the home-gaming mainstream market for at least 3 years by the time those two started seriously competing as video game machines.

And if you factor in the hand-held single-game machines, such as those by Mattel-Electronics, Texas Instruments, Casio, and just about anybody who made silicone chips back in the day, you can put "mobile" gaming devices almost 10 years before even the venerable Mode X in DOS was popularized.

The point is that the trend has always been to go from niche to mainstream by way of commoditization and personalization of the devices. DIY kits gave way to ready-made micro-computers; early arcade machines gave way to home video game machines; and so it seems natural that complex, custom-rigged PCs will be displaced eventually by simpler, cheaper, and more personal commodity devices like mobile phones or tablets.

            -dZ.

Re:News at 11

[somersault]

I'm aware of this. I have helped out many uninformed people when doing IT support. There is a big difference between the morons, and those that choose to learn. They both start off in the same place, but the morons stay at the "don't want to know, just make it work already damnit!" level, while the not-morons ask questions and try to help themselves first before relying on others.

Have a look at this interview. Here are some nice comments from some true morons:

“I don’t know how the heck you do this!!!!!!!!!! “Drag and drop to build the pipe”? WHAT???? Somebody please tell me how to do this!”

“I’m only on the 6th level and I hate this game. Levels are ridiculously hard from the start and are just stupid. I spent an hour on one level and still cannot beat it. Screw this crap. Worst. Purchase. Ever.”

“Don’t get it, it will get you very frustrated if you don’t beat a level bottom line don’t get it”

Re:News at 11

[somersault]

Is saying something "isn't innovative" bad mouthing it? There are many thousands of books, movies, games, etc, that are not innovative, but they do what they set out to do well. I tried Plants vs Zombies and it didn't seem like a particularly bad game, but it just felt like a combination of other flash/puzzle games I've played in the past, and it took way too long to ramp up the difficulty. I saw my flatmate play his first game for something like an hour or two, and when I tried playing it myself I got bored within 20 minutes.. we're both above average gamers of course, but I seriously can't be bothered with such a trivial game. Okay, maybe that was bad-mouthing a little.

Re:News at 11

[interkin3tic]

in the same way that cheap reality TV is detracting from more expensive but higher quality shows.

But I think reality TV is only detracting from quality shows because air time is the limiting resource. I've heard of good shows getting pushed out of their time slot by crappy reality TV, sure, but games don't have time slots. They might not suffer the same fate. Movies might be a better comparison. Hollywood makes big-budget films in addition to cheap movies since the two aren't competing for showtimes, at least not quite as directly as reality TV shows compete with real TV shows.

Uhh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Angry birds is not innovation. It's the best of a mediocre selection.

How Ironic

[Kees Van Loo-Macklin]

He talks about how "innovation wasn't coming from large development firms like EA and Ubisoft, but from smaller, more nimble developers like his own.".... yet, angry birds is an obvious rip off of another game, Crush the Castle, which was developed by Armor Games quite some time before A.B. Try it out for yourself... http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle

Re:How Ironic

[MoonBuggy]

What was your point there, exactly? It seems to support what the OP said, not refute it.

Re:How Ironic

[Seumas]

You're both off. They're both very much based on Scorched Earth, from 1991. A game that probably 95% of us have played at some point (especially in the 90s). I'm pretty sure Scorched Earth wasn't the original, either, but it was sure as fuck a site earlier than the supposedly "innovative" Angry Birds (and all the flash games that were around long before Angry Birds that were essentially the same thing, too).

The success of Angry Birds is kind of like the band that is beloved for decades and never receives the commercial or critical success and acclaim. Decades after, another band comes along and essentially rips off their entire personal and style and sound and maybe even directly cops some of their music and it's at just the right time that everyone in the world hears it and digs it and THEY receive acclaim and success for being geniuses, when all they really did was cop from the real geniuses. Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20. Why the rest of the world isn't calling it for what it really is, I have no fucking clue.

Re:How Ironic

[Seumas]

I keep referring to Scorched Earth, from 1991, as it's probably the most widely recognized and played game from the "artillery" genre and a great demonstration of how Angry Birds is any fucking thing except innovative.

To be more specific, however, Scorched Earth and Gorillas came out in 1991. Other games since then that you might recognize as pre-dating Angry Birds by a very long time is Gorillas 2 (also in the early 90s) and Scorched3D just awhile back. Pretty much everyone is also familiar with the Worms series, of which there have been tons over the last fifteen or twenty years. Before any of these, was a game called Tank Wars (1990).

The earliest that I know of is also mentioned in the Artillery genre page on wikipedia and is called (shock) Artillery. It came out on the Apple II in 1980. Of course, that was also graphical. As the article itself mentions, there were text versions published even before that (apparently only written up and distributed in Creative Computing magazine). So it would appear that the first graphical version of an Angry Birds style game came out in 1980 and the first version *at all* was in the 70s.

Hard to call yourself "innovative" when all you've done is rip off a game that has been around for a minimum of 32 years.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

Re:How Ironic

[MoonBuggy]

The original graphical artillery games were early 80s, apparently, but I think it's a stretch to call them the basis for Angry Birds. Yes, they both use ballistic trajectories, but the gameplay is quite different; if Angry Birds were based solely on Scorched Earth, then I'd say all credit to them - it's been changed enough to be called innovative. That said, it probably wasn't entirely original, since Crush the Castle is near-identical and came out first.

It's just the way things go. Some guy happens to get caught in a perfect storm of marketing, word-of-mouth, and general new technology buzz, and suddenly there's a new multi-millionaire on the block. Doesn't matter whether they were the best, or the first, they were just the luckiest.

Re:How Ironic

[MemoryDragon]

Actually Angry Birds gameplay stems even back to the first computer games, does anyone of you guys still remember one of the first multiplayer games where two players where behind their own castle and the entire gameplay evolved around hitting the other player. There were myriads of variants of this gameplay, one being single player with different levels the other one being multiplayer with two players etc...

Re:How Ironic

[Remus Shepherd]

You're all missing the point. If you read other interviews by the Rovio execs, you'll see that the gameplay is almost secondary for them. What they consider innovative about their game is that there are birds, and they are angry, and their enemies are pigs and there's a good reason for them to hate each other.

Rovio is all about the business of innovative Intellectual Property -- the story, the backstory, and the emotional appeal of their game. And they have a point. If Angry Birds had been a game about launching brightly colored balls into abstract towers for no apparent reason it would not have done so well. But the gameplay isn't the innovative part; their innovation is the compelling storyline and the IP that Angry Birds represent. Console games are not as innovative about creating new IP, with almost every console game being a sequel of previous games or a movie tie-in.

Of course, now that Rovio has a winning IP, they are going to ride it into the ground. Which kind of makes their arguments about 'innovative IP' pretty hypocritical. If they come up with another hit using a new storyline and cast of characters, then I might give them some chops in the innovation department.

Re:How Ironic

[PingSpike]

They didn't even innovate on the price! I distinctly remember Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games...$1.00 on the title screen.

Of course he is correct

[stumblingblock]

But kids will always want some DS or PSP experience, and hardcore gamers will want advanced PC only games. XBox, Playstation, yeah, nothing looks interesting there.

Angry Birds is innovative?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

What part of that game is innovative?

But more importantly, innovation in entertainment is overrated. Games don't have to be innovative all the time. Quite often people want a similar experience as they had with a previous game: brand new story and environments, but similar gameplay.

Re:Angry Birds is innovative?

[WaroDaBeast]

Exactly.

This is why sequels that work have a different environment, but the same gameplay (with a couple of new elements in it). I'm thinking about the Prince of Persia trilogy here — SoT, WW and TTT.

Innovation?

[Sarten-X]

I remember playing with banana-flinging gorillas in the early nineties. By the late nineties, I remember playing a catapult game where the target would collapse according to a fairly decent physics engine. Where's the innovation, exactly?

Not entirely accurate about pricing.

[nebaz]

There are several downloadable games (I can only speak for the Wii) that can be bought for $15 or less. It is not $50 for all games.

Nintendo Exec Says Phone Games Are Dying

[Looce]

"Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata went on the offensive today against his smartphone counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by individuals like Peter Vesterbacka is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Iwata said that innovation wasn't coming from independent game coders, but from large and established companies like his own. Iwata also pointed to the major concern over the price model for smartphone games. Compared to games on established consoles, which hover around fifty dollars, mobile titles like Angry Birds run for 99 cents and make their developers little money due to the policies of online app stores. At these price points, "there's no motivation [for] high-value video games," Iwata said. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for console games had yet to be completely figured out."

Okay, not exactly, but Iwata-san did say something against smartphones at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a mere 13 days ago.

Re:Uhh, Citation Please!?

[Lissajous]

Yups - real hard to find sales figures. If only there were a video game chart site around somewhere.

Oh....wait.....

http://www.vgchartz.com/hardware_totals.php

Nevermind.

Re:Louis Vuitton Outlet

[Spad]

I think you need to work on your spambot; advertising designer handbags and purses on Slashdot isn't exactly marketing genius...

Re:Duh?

[AuMatar]

Actually that'd be Android- they're outselling Apple by a good margin.

Consoles are dying. Peter Vesterbacka confirms it

[bmo]

It is now official. Peter Vesterbacka has confirmed: consoles are dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered console community when IDC confirmed that console market share has dropped yet again, now down to a fraction of 1 percent of the gaming market. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that consoles have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. consoles are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in a self selected online straw poll by Peter Vesterbacka.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict the future of consoles. The hand writing is on the wall: consoles have a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for consoles because consoles are dying. Things are looking very bad for consoles As many of us are already aware, consoles continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Atari consoles are the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of their core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time console developers Ralph Lippschitz and Betty Jo Underhill only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: consoles are dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Casual gaming leader Zynga states that there were 125 million new Farmville subscribers last year. How many users of Wii are there? Let's see. The number of Farmville versus Wii posts on Facebook is roughly in ratio of 39,000 to 1. Therefore there are about 125,000,000/39000 = 3205 Wii users. PSP posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Wii subscriptions. Therefore there are about 1600 users of the sony PSP. A recent article put Atari at about 50 percent of the PSP market. Therefore there are (3200+1600+8000=) 56005 console users. This is consistent with the number of Twitter posts.

Due to the troubles of Id software, abysmal sales and so on, Sega went out of business and was taken over by Nokia who sell another troubled platform. Now Nokia is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Consoles steadily declined in market share. Consoles are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If consoles are to survive at all they will be among gaming dilettante dabblers. Consoles continuec to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Consoles are dead.

That crippling bombshell sent console fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.

--
BMO

Re:Very insightful parent

[click2005]

Welcome to 2015 where you pay $5 to unlock each level in CoD8 for 7 days.

And now in Slashdot...

[fabioalcor]

We have Angry Geeks!

NO innovation happens in high stakes entertainment

[Opportunist]

You will NEVER see any A-Title game or blockbuster movie push the envelope. The risk is simply way too high. You know where you have to look for innovation? Flash games and YouTube. Yes, Flashgames and YouTube. Why? Because there projects can and do happen that have no budget and no ROI concerns. Do what you think is fun and see if others agree. That's pretty much it. Even Penny-Games for Mobiles isn't the innovation ground, and neither is "Alternative" and "Independent" Movies. Even they already have the ROI breathing down their neck.

Innovation happens where the crowd rules. Do you think any music exec would have invested a dime in things like Autotune-the-News? Or a game studio dropped a penny on Tower Defense? Pennygames and "alternative" publishers picked both styles up for the single reason that the free version became popular. With both you could have gone to an indie publisher and got turned away without the obvious popularity they enjoy.

You will notice a "progression", though. There are thousands of games and movies produced without a ROI in mind, for the love of it, because someone wanted to play a game like this or hear a song like this themselves. One or two of them will be popular with others, and these ideas will then be picked up by indies and published. And if there's a chance that people would drop big bucks on a "polished" version of it, big studios will pick it up.

That's how "innovation" works today.

Question of simple economics - beholden to whom?

[zooblethorpe]

They are two different kinds of execs.

You have an exec of an Indie game which probably never expected to make so much money.

An EA exec on the other hand is employed to get the maximum money for the shareholders. More often then not experimental games don't make as much revenue as the mainstream ones. You mess up, you get fired. So it is safer for the exec to release another NFL/FPS/Sims game then it is to make something new.

Looking at the economics (in terms of motivations and the psychology of situations), the basic question can also be broken down to which group the exec is trying to please.

• For the indie company, privately owned, management needs to look at the bottom line -- sales, where the money comes in -- and is thus beholden to the customers.
• For the major corporation, post-IPO and publicly owned, management needs to look at the top line -- profits, the numbers that affect the share price -- and is thus beholden to the shareholders.

This is a gross oversimplification, but it does begin to illustrate why so many corporations seem to care exactly squat about their customer bases, whereas smaller and medium-sized privately-owned companies tend to pay more attention to what people buying their products and/or services actually want.

Cheers,