Eidos president Ian Livingstone has stressed that gamers still yearn for single-player experiences, and that it won’t simply “disappear overnight”.
Speaking to MCV, Livingstone used Crystal Dynamics – who also operates as a subsidiary to Square Enix – as an example with their upcoming Tomb Raider reboot:
I think people still want a single player experience. The games industry is diversifying and is making new ways of delivering, new ways of playing games. One is certainly not totally at the expense of each other, and I think games as a product and as a service can live happily alongside each other for a long time to come.
A game like Tomb Raider has historically been a graphically intensive single player experience, and that’s not simply going to disappear overnight. What we’re seeing is an emergence and a growth in the digital area and a new consumer which has come along (the casual gamer, which has almost reached ascendancy), but niche gamers are still going to be here and want content delivered specifically for them.
He added that titles have to tailored to its console by having content being relevant to the platform:
You’ve got to create a game that’s relevant to the platform on which it’s delivered, therefore the graphic-rich interactive experience of console Lara [Croft] is inevitably going to be different to the experience that you’d expect on a mobile device.
Tomb Raider is currently scheduled for a worldwide release on March 5th, 2013.
