Konami's view of the future of gaming

Retr0gamer

Stolen from Neogaf here. It doesn't paint a pretty picture but it looks like the analysis done by Konami is pretty much spot on:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1107626

The big thing to take is that Mobile will completely replace handheld games. I can see this definitely happening. 3DS and Vita sales have dropped dramatically and support for the platforms is vanishing. The vita is only home to japanese niche RPGs aimed at the otaku crowd while the 3DS is becoming like the WiiU, only supported by Nintendo itself and by smaller publishers like Atlus with japanese development moving wholesale to mobile.

The other thing to take from it is the slow decline of consoles. The PS4 is a huge success for Sony at the moment but it is glossing over a worrying fact, combined console sales are way down on what they were at in previous generations at this point. Konami are predicting growth in the following years but sales will drop. I'd be more inclined to say that price drops will help shift more units but as it stands I feel the console market is becoming very insular and really only aiming at the core gamer crowd and has totally lost the asian markets to Mobile.

Konami is suggesting a modular upgradable system would work better for consoles, I can see it as a disaster since console add ons have traditionally been a disaster and really is just completing the console platforms transformation into a PC.

They don't predict Virtual Reality to take off soon either. It still has two obstacles to overcome, the space needed to use it and the fact you look like a dork while wearing it.

The big growth areas look to be Mobile and PC. Mobile will continue to grow and unlike consoles it has a much wider demographic of customers to tap. PC has steadily grown as well thanks to the asian markets and f2p successes but even core game sales are up.

Myrddin

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Konami is suggesting a modular upgradable system would work better for consoles,

Skerries

I really don't know how the mobile gaming market is doing so well as the games are awful or if they are anyway decent they have IAP which just ruins it
The controls are terrible as they don't have dedicated buttons if you wanted to play an fps or similar button bashing games
you really can't make mobile gaming a staple gaming platform as it really is only for casual games such as puzzles or games that use the swipe feature

death1234567

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Konami is suggesting a modular upgradable system would work better for consoles, I can see it as a disaster since console add ons have traditionally been a disaster and really is just completing the console platforms transformation into a PC.

Acers-little-modular-pc-snaps-together-like-legos/

Retr0gamer

Skerries wrote: »

I really don't know how the mobile gaming market is doing so well as the games are awful or if they are anyway decent they have IAP which just ruins it
The controls are terrible as they don't have dedicated buttons if you wanted to play an fps or similar button bashing games
you really can't make mobile gaming a staple gaming platform as it really is only for casual games such as puzzles or games that use the swipe feature

Companies don't care about how good or bad the games are. All they care about is making money and so far a small investment into a crappy little skinner box app will rake in far more revenue as profit than something like MGSV which took years to make and cost multiple millions of investment. It's kind of crappy for people that like games but the figures being reported don't lie about the direction gaming is going. Jeremy Parish has said that you can usually look to Japan for the future of gaming, that is a country were home consoles are dead, handhelds are nearly dead and mobile has taken over nearly completely.

Konami in that report however have pointed towards the market becoming saturated and needing bigger budgets to stand out which they will try to do by taking assets from triple A games. It's not an inconceivable stretch of the imagination to see mobile taking over from consoles, especially if you consider stuff like cloud computing, streaming or using your mobile as a docking station for a console like experience.

Generic Dreadhead

Konami can show all the graphs and charts till the cows come home, I still don't trust them to know their arse from their elbow when it comes to making decent games via any medium

gizmo

Skerries wrote: »

I really don't know how the mobile gaming market is doing so well as the games are awful or if they are anyway decent they have IAP which just ruins it
The controls are terrible as they don't have dedicated buttons if you wanted to play an fps or similar button bashing games
you really can't make mobile gaming a staple gaming platform as it really is only for casual games such as puzzles or games that use the swipe feature

I'd like to call that a gross generalisation as there are some fantastic games on mobile but the kicker is, while critically well received, the revenue generated from them still pales in comparison to the output from the likes of King or individual titles like Game of War. I mean, when you see reports saying that advertising spending by these heavyweights has now outstripped that of the traditional console publishers and that some of these titles are bringing in more than $1.2m per day it's not overly surprising when you see companies like Konami shift their business practices in that direction.

To riff on what Retr0gamer said above, it does suck for those of us who do love games on these platforms and I guess that's what bugs me when I see people championing the dramatic fall in prices which new games can be had for from various alternate sources. Whatever about the huge revenues being generated by mobile games, I do think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by embracing this kind of stuff. While I've yet to see anything to back it up, I really can't see it being sustainable in the long term if this is the direction we're going.

Retr0gamer

Cormac... wrote: »

Konami can show all the graphs and charts till the cows come home, I still don't trust them to know their arse from their elbow when it comes to making decent games via any medium

This is unfortunately nothing to do with making games. This is how Konami see the industry going and it because of those stats and figures that we saw them cull their internal development studios recently.

gizmo wrote: »

Whatever about the huge revenues being generated by mobile games, I do think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by embracing this kind of stuff. While I've yet to see anything to back it up, I really can't see it being sustainable in the long term if this is the direction we're going.

Nothing wrong with being a savvy customer. It's not our fault that publishers only bank on the first wave of sales in the first month then leave their over stocked game to drop in price on shop shelves. If Nintendo can attach a value to their games and keep that value for years to come there's no reason other publishers can't by managing stock better.

johnny_ultimate

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Jeremy Parish has said that you can usually look to Japan for the future of gaming, that is a country were home consoles are dead, handhelds are nearly dead and mobile has taken over nearly completely.

The mainstream Japanese and Western markets have never really diverged as radically as they have now, though. Both hardware and software preferences are very, very different now - well, they always were to varying extents, but trends in Japan have rarely if ever seen so profoundly at odds with trends in the West. I think mobile is a long way away from taking over nearly completely here - the market for console gaming is simply too large for them to disappear in the near future. Hell, even the enthusiast market has at this point grown large enough to support pretty significant productions.

I remain optimistic about 'the future of gaming'. Will ****ty business practices continue? Yep. Will blockbusters remain or become increasingly homogenized? Probably, a few exceptions aside. Could hardware preferences or indeed tastes in software change? Very possibly. But games are too strong a cultural force to simply disappear now, and even in an extreme (and IMO for the forseeable future unlikely) example of mobile destroying the traditional console market, or a AAA game crash, I think developers will move and adapt, whether that's in mobile formats or on PC. And if the future sees fewer big budget productions due to cost and lengthy production times, no question the already vibrant and healthy independent scene will keep things plenty interesting. Blockbusters and often disheartening mass market trends haven't suffocated cinema as a creative medium, and it's incredibly unlikely to happen with games either.

gizmo

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Nothing wrong with being a savvy customer. It's not our fault that publishers only bank on the first wave of sales in the first month then leave their over stocked game to drop in price on shop shelves. If Nintendo can attach a value to their games and keep that value for years to come there's no reason other publishers can't by managing stock better.

Oh I don't disagree, but that's not the kind of pricing and attitudes I'm talking about. Moreso, the rise in popularity of the various cdkey sites where, for instance, new titles like Mad Max could be picked up for £12.99 before release. You can see the change in attitudes even around here too. People appear less likely to shell out full price for games because they know they can be picked up on such sites for a fraction of what they cost even at reasonable retail prices. Even then they know shortly after launch they'll fall in price and if not, they can just wait for a sale because they have so many other titles already purchased under similar circumstances.

There's even some odd fringe opinions becoming more prevalent, like the fact that games should launch with a discount and doing so without one could be deemed "risky" nowadays. That $15 for an expansion that adds hours worth of content is a "rip off" because the base game only cost them under $25. That a discount of 33% a couple of weeks after release on the likes of Steam is somehow indicative of publishers being "cheap". These can then be accompanied by incredulity when those same companies aren't willing to put significant resources into ports for platforms where the revenue is demonstrably lower than that for those where this kind of pricing is less prevalent.

To address your other point, you're completely right in this respect. I would much prefer to see more better stock control and a more organic price drop over time. If anything, it would allow people who want the game straight away to be able to pay full whack for it and not feel hard done by a handful of weeks later when the price is a fraction of what it was. By all means be savvy, shop around and avoid places like Gamestop who still appear to be charging more than their competitors on the high street too but, in general, with budgets rising and software sales not growing in a similar fashion, the last thing we need to see is a shift towards customers expecting the same if not higher standards of titles at considerably lower prices.

That being said, as johnny_ultimate pointed out, it's not like many of these companies won't adapt to these changing conditions but it's how they plan to adapt that has me somewhat concerned.

Kylo Ren

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Stolen from Neogaf here. It doesn't paint a pretty picture but it looks like the analysis done by Konami is pretty much spot on:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1107626

The big thing to take is that Mobile will completely replace handheld games. I can see this definitely happening. 3DS and Vita sales have dropped dramatically and support for the platforms is vanishing. The vita is only home to japanese niche RPGs aimed at the otaku crowd while the 3DS is becoming like the WiiU, only supported by Nintendo itself and by smaller publishers like Atlus with japanese development moving wholesale to mobile.

The other thing to take from it is the slow decline of consoles. The PS4 is a huge success for Sony at the moment but it is glossing over a worrying fact, combined console sales are way down on what they were at in previous generations at this point. Konami are predicting growth in the following years but sales will drop. I'd be more inclined to say that price drops will help shift more units but as it stands I feel the console market is becoming very insular and really only aiming at the core gamer crowd and has totally lost the asian markets to Mobile.

Konami is suggesting a modular upgradable system would work better for consoles, I can see it as a disaster since console add ons have traditionally been a disaster and really is just completing the console platforms transformation into a PC.

They don't predict Virtual Reality to take off soon either. It still has two obstacles to overcome, the space needed to use it and the fact you look like a dork while wearing it.

The big growth areas look to be Mobile and PC. Mobile will continue to grow and unlike consoles it has a much wider demographic of customers to tap. PC has steadily grown as well thanks to the asian markets and f2p successes but even core game sales are up.

I think you're being a bit disingenuous with the bolded statement. Xbox One and PS4 are selling much better than the 360 and PS3 were at the same point in their life cycles. 50% better.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/260812/ps4-and-xbox-one-vs-ps3-and-xbox-360-aligned-sales-comparison-july-2015-update/

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/strong-ps4-xbox-one-sales-50-versus-ps3-xbox-360-npd-report-1515459

It's when you add in the Wii U's disastrous sales and the Wii's ridiculous success that you see a dip between the two generations.

Outkast_IRE

Alot of the consoles are now essentially mini PCs anyway, i think the availability of steam machines and powerful small form PCs/media centres will take over from the consoles.

If microsoft had any sense they would push the next xbox into this segment.

lawlolawl

Konami are about to turn into a Pachinko (sp?) machine company.

MGS 5 was their last big game.

They canned Silent Hills and booted Kojima. Their view on the future of gaming is irrelevant now.

K.O.Kiki

lawlolawl wrote: »

Konami are about to turn into a Pachinko (sp?) machine company.

MGS 5 was their last big game.

They canned Silent Hills and booted Kojima. Their view on the future of gaming is irrelevant now.

bunnyarmstrong

Personally (and I can't stress that word enough), I'm finding it very hard to justify my PS4 purchase lately. The last games I played and enjoyed were Limbo and Transistor. The big budget AAA releases have been over all, quite disappointing. Hell, I've had more use out of my PS4 as a media player.

I think it may be time for me to join the PC master race and just play Monkey Island over and over again.

um7y1h83ge06nx

I don't play games as much as I used to or want to but I really dislike mobile gaming. Sure it does make financial sense and business will always chase the cash cow but for any non-casual gamer, mobile means poor games.

I do see the death of handhelds though, smartphones have seen so many functions integrated into it, not many people not carry around dedicated audio and video devices, they use their phones. Maybe the quality and depth of mobile gaming will improve?

Consoles as hardware are handy, even for a techie like me. People don't have to worry about drivers or tweaking settings to best suit their GPU etc. I do think that it may be difficult to have 3 main console manufacturers in the future and would controversially say that Nintendo may have an uphill battle to continue as a hardware manufacturer (although people have been saying that for a long time).

If worst comes to worst there are enough of great games already out there that I haven't played to last me the rest of my life.

Retr0gamer

These days I'm actually finding my consoles much more of a chore to use than my PC. My PC updates graphics drivers automatically now and without the need to reset and even the upgrade to windows 10 was relatively painless. Connecting online is also much easier. Compare that to the ceaseless updates on consoles that block you out of playing games for up to an hour until they complete and I've always found setting up a wireless connection such a chore on console, more than likely due to the platform holders being very protective of their security (and rightfully so).

I'd really hate to see handhelds die because they offer something completely different from mobile and from smartphones. They have taken over the B tier games that just don't exist on console anymore. However lately games have dried up on the Vita and 3DS. Vita is just home to Otaku games while the 3DS is really only being backed by Nintendo. Handheld japanese developers all seem to have moved to mobile which has taken over Japan. Nintendo could keep the market alive with Pokemon but Level 5's Yokai Watch has become a bigger franchise than that in Japan and there's nothing stopping Level 5 taking that to mobile. I can see the hnadheld market only getting smaller from here on out.

Nody

Mateo Scary Mouthwash wrote: »

Consoles as hardware are handy, even for a techie like me. People don't have to worry about drivers or tweaking settings to best suit their GPU etc. I do think that it may be difficult to have 3 main console manufacturers in the future and would controversially say that Nintendo may have an uphill battle to continue as a hardware manufacturer (although people have been saying that for a long time).

I'd say the opposite is true; Nintendo is the most likely to keep doing consoles. It has always made money on it's consoles; it has a gaming library that will always make people buy the console and unlike the other two it's not losing insane amounts of money simply to have a console or built a weak PC as it's latest console (which means anything built for Sony or MS could in reality be done on PC relatively easy as well).

It was also the one company that got through the last crunch and kept on producing consoles which is more than can be said for it's competitors.

Shougeki

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I can see it as a disaster since console add ons have traditionally been a disaster

Lies.
I still have my Steel Battalion controller for the original Xbox.....

cherryghost

I come home from work. I see Xbox/Wii U/PC. I turn on said Wii U. Slow to boot games, slow for online MM. I move to PC. Instaboot, play games, read reddit/boards.ie/email/facebook while I game, listen to spotify while I game.

As much as I love my consoles, I've just found myself going to my PC for the evening after work as its much faster and always lets me do plenty more stuff for my hectic lifestyle.

I still think 3DS has some kick left in it, recently Nintendo posted similar thoughts to Konami regarding mobile being the future, which raises the question where the NX is going.

Azza

Why are Nintendo the only ones backing the 3DS? I thought that it was doing the bomb when it comes to sales.

TrustedApple

Kids now are getting tablets instead of a games console as before in old place of work i used to see kids used to be playing there 3DS or DS in work and even the odd strange one with a Vita witch i would be question to myself what would a 7 year old be doing with one of them as its not a kid friendly console at all.

But now you would see them all sitting down on there tablets playing minecraft and the likes.

While myself at 23 years old hates touch screen gaming with a passion i have a note 4 myself and it is a large phone with a 5.7 inch screen but nope i cant play games on it as useing a touch screen controller is not the same at all. I would rather a controller and thats it. To me a video game need to have a controller other wise its not a game to me. I have to have something to press while playing a video game.

Retr0gamer

Azza wrote: »

Why are Nintendo the only ones backing the 3DS? I thought that it was doing the bomb when it comes to sales.

Western devs are focusing on console and PC. Japanese devs are moving to mobile. Handheld software sales are also way down at the moment for anything but Nintendo games. It's like the Wii's last few years.

Also Nintendo will keep doing consoles because unlike Sony and Microsoft it's the only business they know and have. Even still they are making in roads back into toys with Amiibo and mobile. If wost comes to worst Nintendo can probably survive with a niche wiiU type console but really shareholders won't be happy unless they can create something that grabs a huge demographic like the DS or Wii.