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

[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

[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

[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?

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

[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:Very insightful parent

[click2005]

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