I have a confession to make. Even though I´m 26 years old I still have a passion for video games, and that passion will never go away. You can never get to old for video games. I was sitting at home with my friends on Friday evening playing my latest purchased video game console called Nintendo Wii. When I was playing this new game a started to think about trendspotting & Future thinking. This Nintendo Wii is a new and revolutionary game. It ´s revolutionary because of the way you play the game. You have a sensor bar on top of your TV that connects with the sensor bar on each of the controllers. Instead of just sitting down in the sofa and pressing some buttons you have to do the movement by yourself that you want your guy on the TV to do. So in other words, if you want your guy to swing the golf club you will have to do a full swing yourself, then the sensor bar senses how you swing the club, and "voila" your guy makes the exact swing. This is the first game that contains this kind of motion sensitive controller. This made me thinking about how fast the video game development is going and made me wonder where we are heading.
The first video games reached the markets in the late 70`s and early 80`s. They were very simple but still big. I mean look at the fist Nintendo console. The console was a big box, the games were as big as a DVD cover and the controllers were attached with a cord and they had 2 main buttons and two extra buttons and a steering button on the left hand side. It was very simple back then, the graphics were very bad but at that time it felt revolutionary. After the years have gone by the video game development has exploded. There are many actors on the market that are competing over the customers, this forces the companies to invest more and more money in the development section to keep up the pace with the other companies.
So, what´s the next step in the video game era….?
Predicting the future is never easy, especially not in this fast-paced world of video games. But I´m going to make an attempt. Nintendo Wii is a kind of trend that has started in the video game industry. But you can say that there are two trends that have started. One of them is the motion sensitive controller that has opened up gaming for people who wouldn´t normally play videogames and the other one are the mainstream mature games. Quiz games for grown up people, music games that both kids and grownups can play. These two trends will last a while.
Another thing that keeps getting bigger and that also opens up gaming for new people are the low-commitment games. These are games where you don´t have to read a 30-page manual. You can spot this in the Nintendo Wii, where they have a retro section where you can download old games to your new Wii. You can for example download Ice Climber that was released in the early 80´s that was very popular and easy to play. I think that the future will contain more and more games where you can “feel” the game and where you can “move” realistic to it.
The future will also contain a bigger network where you don´t have to invite your friends to your home to play against them, instead you will for example only need to connect to facebook or something to play against them. This is something that exists today, but I think it will get bigger and better. Last but not least, I think that all the games will disappear. That sounds very bold, but what I mean is that in the future I think that instead of going to the store to buy I game you just pay directly online and download the game.
That´s all for now!
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