David Perry on the Future of Gaming

David Perry, co-founder of Acclaim Entertainment and a longtime veteran of the videogame industry, delivered his first ever talk at DICE this year. Though his voice was a new one, the message was not. Like many of the other speakers at the summit, Perry's message focused on how important it will be for gaming companies to interact more and more with gamers in the future to be successful, an echo of Gabe Newell's keynote address with some new ideas thrown in for good measure.

The talk opened with a discussion of how the games business has changed with the way data has been stored and processed. In the beginning, storage was limited and slow to access while processing power was lacking. The future, says Perry, will be cloud computing and storage. In this model, gamers won't have to own the hardware or software. Everything could be done on servers and be totally scalable. The model wouldn't be far off from the old arcades, he noted. This can't happen just yet, of course, due to broadband internet access penetrating households at a slow pace.

This could be the downfall of the home console, Perry said. "Gamers are getting used to everything else being one click away. It's really an early warning to the console companies. If you don't give the access to the gamers, someone else will."

Perry then began to talk about Flash games. While this may seem uninteresting to the average IGN reader, the implications of what he said should be. Alongside calling for standards in development, including a universal Flash API and working together to create databases of gamer reputations (primarily to protect children from sexual predators), he gave his vision of the future of the gaming business.

The argument began with a discussion of Stardoll, an online web game that targets young girls. "As a designer, it's so easy for us to dismiss something like this," said Perry. Yet, when you look at the revenue and number of people playing, it is clear that, "The customers are speaking to you, you just have to listen."

After looking at the successful online Flash and HTML games -- and launching several himself -- Perry has come to this outlook, "I will never make a single player game again. I personally believe that the days of single player games are numbered." The future is in social gaming, developers becoming closer to gamers than ever before, and getting players involved with generating their own content and taking ownership of the games. Perry even noted that his company has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by creating a PHP application that allows the gamers to translate games to their native languages themselves through the web.

Online, free to play games, are a huge business that many developers of console and PC games ignore. This is bad news for a future that Perry sees as dominated by micro-transactions. "Each generation we increase our prices and we make the wall higher. Gamers have to climb that wall to play your game." He then posed the million dollar question: "What would happen if a really good game was released for free? Imagine if Will Wright announced his next game was free to play? That would be really hard to compete with."

"The key trend is that we're going to be getting closer to our gamers than ever before," Perry noted. The landscape of the videogame business is changing and Perry warned that if publishers and developers didn't act, the game creators in China and Korea that are already beginning to do this -- while offering their games for free -- will find all of the investment money rushing their way.

What do you think? Are free to play, social games the future? Will single-player games die? Leave a comment below to sound off.

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/955/955582p1.html