Famed creator of the The Sims, Will Wright recently spoke out on the future of dedicated video game consoles, noting that they’ll likely lose a bit of their relevance as gaming begins to expand and diversify across a wide spectrum of devices.
Speaking to GI.biz, Wright clarified his point by explaining that he does not believe that consoles are “doomed” per say, but rather that they’ll likely fade from the forefront as casual gaming continues to grow in popularity.
I think they’re not going to become the mainstay of the market like they had been.
I think there’ll probably still be dedicated game machines going forwards, sitting on a shelf next to your HDTV. I think that they’re going to be catering to a very specific kind of player, which probably isn’t that different from what they were catering to before. It’s just that a lot more people are now playing games, and they’re not playing it on that device.
There is no doubt that the industry is growing, and while hardcore console gaming is still very relevant in today’s world of entertainment, the soaring popularity of iOS and social network games have quickly begun to prove just as popular, if not more so.
Wright then went on to talk specifically about how games have evolved over the past several years, stating that while “games really used to be something that were targeted to 16-year-old boys,” the industry has evolved so that “now we have people of all generations, genders, walks of life, playing games, a lot of them on their cell phones, or on Facebook, or whatever.”
