Ben Cousins, general manager of Ngmoco, formerly of EA DICE, Sony, and Lionhead, has not been shy about his support of the mobile space, or of freemium. He was the driving force behind EA's free to play Battlefield Heroes, and now Ngmoco's Swedish studio's triple-A iOS title.
At GDC Taipei, Cousins gave a keynote that shared his projections for the five big trends in the game industry across the next 5-10 years. Most interestingly, Cousins outlined how and why he believes freemium and mobile will effectively kill game consoles.
"When I'm talking about mobile, I'm talking about the operating system, not the device," he clarifies. "I believe these operating systems will start to appear in other classes of devices, other than just mobile phones and tablets. In the future I think mobile gaming maybe won't be so mobile, and we may need a new definition for them."
The acquisition of Zynga by Take-Two Interactive might become the video game industry's version of the AOL Time Warner merger.
I have to give props for the use of Electric Boogaloo reference. I don't think many young folk will even know what that is.
On topic... wasn't that where Don Mattrick went after leaving XB?
Mobile publisher and developer Zynga, with the hiring of Matt Wolf as VP, seeks to reaffirm its intentions to enter blockchain gaming.
After a year in soft-launch, Zynga's nostalgia-evoking title FarmVille 3 is geared for a global release with the launch of a sneak peek video
"We've got approximately 8 hours to stop that from happening."
"We WILL... Stop THAT from happening!"
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
LOL! Not gonna happen my distant Ben Cousin. LOL!
Yeah, sure; like how digital downloads just took over this gen as predicted, right?
Isn't that funny that people who predict death of consoles all work in social/PC gamedev?
Consoles will never die
They've been saying this since the PC.