"The industry is becoming less competitive"; Geoff Keighley talks Stadia, The Game Awards and more

In a chat with Spiel Times, Geoff Keighley discusses video games as an artform, sustainability of the gaming industry, Google Stadia and VR.

[Tapani]

What is he babbling about? There are more games than ever, more publishers and developers than ever, and more console makers than ever, and everyone is competing for the very little time gamers nowadays have. Average gamers are somewhere around 34 - 38 years old working people and these are the so called busy years both at work and home, but at the same time these guys have most money to buy games.

[0hMyGandhi]

He's not "babbling" about anything. He is simply referring to the gradual diminishment of "exclusives" in the games industry. As more people throw their hat into the ring, and GAAS and other features continue to bloom, more developers and publishers are looking at casting as wide a net as possible, not relegating itself to any one particular platform. There are exceptions, of course, but you need only look at how fierce the "console wars" were in the past, with each platform having their "mascots" that'd never grace other platforms.

Now...It's pretty much Sony and Nintendo to carry the torch of maintaining any semblance of exclusivity. And Nintendo doesn't consider themselves a "direct" competitor in the console wars.

When Mario and Pokemon made their way onto mobile, and Microsoft putting all of Halo on PC, it pretty much centers the attention on Sony. We aren't going to see Kratos or Nathan Drake on other platforms because Sony has (successfully) held themselves to the standard of selling their system as a "gaming system first" because being a "media hub" is hilariously easy and means nothing of significance in 2019.

[Tapani]

In which games industry segment? If you look at Japan, China and Korea, you've got plenty of exclusives on all types of different platforms from PC to consoles. There's a lot of money for example used by both Tencent and NCSoft who offer exclusive content to PC, former having revenue of $30bn and latter growing extremely fast past the $2bn mark. Not to mentioned the huge library of portable console exclusives from publishers in Japan. Switch and 3DS have vast amount of exclusive contents from Nintendo which has sales of $10bn (while a lot of it is from licenses, they still invest into exclusives which also sells the most) in addition to large 3rd parties. Even Epic Games has exclusives more and more on PC, and Steam will have to respond.

With the rise of GAAS there will be larger than ever investments in gaming industry so far in exclusive contents which is just as how Disney and Netflix are competing. The Content is the name of the game, and that will remain exclusive and cost money. Hence, the competition is actually getting tougher.

Geoff is concentrated on the Western gaming markets which are smaller than APAC. Here's the revenue of the top 5 countries of gaming, three of them being in Asia:

1 China - $34,400M
2 United States of America - $31,535M
3 Japan - $17,715M
4 Republic of Korea - $5,764M
5 Germany - $4,989M

[sprinterboy]

You mean most gamers only buying 9/10 reviewed games and leaving the rest to struggle.
Great loads of healthy competition/S

Edit: or awesome indie games selling 20,000 or BR mode being so stupidly popular 80% of casual gamers only playing one game fortnite and not purchasing or trying other games.

Like I said healthy competition/S

[ibrake4naps]

I agree with him about VR: VR isn’t going to replace traditional gaming, but it will have an important role in the overall gaming experience. It's here to stay but so is flat gaming...

[2pacalypsenow]

Everyone is trying to be friends.

Competition is what makes gaming worth it.

None of this “we’re all winners bullshit”