Kids, these days! They phone it in (when they play video games)

From the Globe today:

Schoolboy me had an orange plastic clamshell that opened up to reveal two screens of Donkey Kong. If you were good, you could jump from the girders on the bottom screen to reach the top screen, and jump on more girders.

A Nintendo Game & Watch had a single, lonesome game on it. So we’d trade. You might get to borrow Mario Bros. (with its calculator screen that displayed just a few positions of Mario, there was nothing super about it). Or you might get stuck babysitting an unused Snoopy Tennis. “Multi-player” basically meant watching another kid play your game to see if he could get further.

JRgamewatch.jpgHand-held games are terrific. Every child of the ‘90s played a Game Boy. Every child of the 2000s played a DS. How popular were they? Nintendo had a period where it was more profitable per employee than Goldman Sachs. When the masters of the universe are bested at their top metric by some guys who actually make something, you can assume that that thing is pretty awesome.

But now, poor Nintendo is on the wrong side of a trend. The stock has been floating down over the years like Mario in his raccoon suit. Something disruptive this way comes: That glass slab in your pocket. A smartphone plays games just as well as anything dreamed up by famed Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi.

In the video game biz, a debate raged for years about whether the console would kill PC game. Some thought user-friendly consoles would become much more mainstream than driver-update-requiring PC games. Meanwhile, Valve came along and built a billion-dollar business selling mainstream games on the PC. That made it hard to say the PC was dead, or even suffering from a little sniffle.

The thing is, a console isn’t quite as necessary as a telephone. And I’ve yet to see anybody pull out their laptop on the Red Line. But a guy playing Owlchemy’s Snuggle Truck on his iPhone? As common on the T as a Red Sox hat.

Cell phones that can play games are soon to be in everyone’s pocket. When you’ve got one, it is hard to justify another device just for video games. Smartphone games as big business is already happening. GungHo Entertainment is the poster child for a successful mobile company of 2013. Its title Puzzle & Dragons was earning more than $3 million a day in January. Recently, its market cap briefly eclipsed Nintendo.

“But wait,” some might say, pipe in hand, as a phonograph plays gently in the background, “I’m not interested in trifling mobile stuff like puzzle games or endless runners. I like Video Games. Zeitgeist and depth and sparkly shaders.” When there’s a platform with an install base of everyone, where some are making bajillions, the publishers of video games won’t ignore it. Brainasium will make a sequel to Eternal Death Slayer for it, as will every other big publisher. Maybe you’ll even hook it up to your TV and play with a Bluetooth controller.

But more to the point, the games of tomorrow will be created by and bought by the kids of today. Middle schoolers play Androids on the bus. Toddlers are entranced by iPads. I took my little niece to see dinosaurs at the natural history museum. A Tyrannosaurus Rex towered over us, its huge jaw agape. She rushed past the old pile of bones to the trivia-displaying iPad mounted in the exhibit, just like the one she loves from playing Dora.

She won’t need to escape the calculator graphics of mobile to the high-rez world of the PC. She’ll grow up without having to fight for time on the living room TV. She’ll grow up with a game machine always in her pocket. Maybe she’ll become the Shigeru Miyamoto of the 2040s? If she does, maybe she’ll write a blathering opinion piece about being a youngster playing on that primitive iOS version 7. It couldn’t hold a candle to the Occulus virtual reality mind jack in her cell phone.

Trevor Stricker is founder and president of Disco Pixel in Kendall Square, maker ofJungle Rumble, a rhythm game in which you bang a drum for freedom, happiness, and bananas. 

This Wednesday, May 15, at 5:30 EDT Trevor will be live streaming LIVE with the guys from Fire Hose Games. http://twitch.tv/firehosegames Of course we’ll talk all about Jungle Rumble and Go Home Dinosaurs. We’ll talk about indie games. We’ll tackle burning questions in evolutionary science: Did monkeys ride dinosaurs? How did the T Rex hold a spatula over the grill with such widdle arms?
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This Wednesday, May 15, at 5:30 EDT Trevor will be live streaming LIVE with the guys from Fire Hose Games.

http://twitch.tv/firehosegames

Of course we’ll talk all about Jungle Rumble and Go Home Dinosaurs. We’ll talk about indie games. We’ll tackle burning questions in evolutionary science: Did monkeys ride dinosaurs? How did the T Rex hold a spatula over the grill with such widdle arms?

The Future of Video Game Consoles

The highlight of my life as a little dude was getting a Nintendo. Hanging out with the neighborhood kids playing Castlevania. Showing my sister warp zones in Super Mario Bros. Painstakingly writing out those long Metroid codes to swap with kids at school. I’m hardly alone. That little grey box has a place in the hearts of many children of the 80s.

As the Wii U posts sales numbers low enough to be a Barry White love song, Sony is trying its hardest to get the world excited about going from 3 to 4. Meanwhile, Microsoft wants you to know that, hey, they’ve got something to check out, too. Real soon, now. Are you excited yet? Hmm? How about now?

Once upon a time, a new console generation was something to get excited about. My first console transition, working in the industry, was the Dreamcast. I got a buzz when a beige box with the beta version of the hardware arrived from Japan. Even my mom, computer illiterate and video game unbeliever, could take one look at the blocky and jagged fighters in the Playstation’s Tekken and see the improvement in the billowy robes of Dreamcast’s Soul Caliber. Sega sent us cool Dreamcast jackets and random people on the street would give you high fives when they saw it. Why?

Because video games are awesome and the Dreamcast was considered the next level of awesome by Joe Sixaxis.

Now it’s 2013. We’ve already seen great 3D graphics. Is it getting that much better? Can my mom to tell a Playstation 4 game from a Playstation 3 game? We’ve already got consoles that live on the network where we can play with our “friends” without ever having to remove our tochis from living room couch. We can already download stuff and see who’s online and stream movies. Is there enough marginal awesomeness to get Joe Sixaxis to pony up for another console generation?

The Playstation 3 cost $500 when it came out, and early reports are that number 4 will debut the same way. That’s a splurge. Especially because you’ll also need a few games for it.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a Galaxy Nexus in my pocket. It has a 720p screen and an HDMI port and can be plugged into my TV. It has the rendering power of a PS2. It has an always on network connection, and picks up my wifi when in my living room. I can download games without a trip to the mall. Add a bluetooth controller or two and that’s a game box. In the year my phone has been out, new phones have specs that are bigger and badder. And cheaper. We all know what’s happening—tech marches on, gets cheaper, and (most importantly) spreads everywhere.

Why isn’t my phone my main gaming machine? Graphics horsepower? No physical joystick? I’d say it’s more that I can’t play Portal 2, Grand Theft Auto V, or Borderlands 2 on it. The games just aren’t there.

Yet.

Smartphones already have an installed base of gamers that rivals game consoles themselves. That’s a market that won’t get ignored. But what if the graphics aren’t quite as sizzlingly pixel shaded as they could be? They’ll be good enough and if you want better there will still be the PC. But how can big budget games be viable on a platform where everything costs 99 cents? Nobody said mobile games will cost 99 cents forever, and when GTA VI comes along gamers will pay what they’re used to for quality that they’re used to. Nobody is going to confuse Jetpack Joyride with Bioshock Infinite.

In the 21st century a cell phone is becoming as basic a thing as electric lights and running water. If that’s a game box too then you don’t need a console. The game specific machine is becoming redundant.

So what happens to the big console makers of today? Does Sony explode into a massive, smoking crater as Nintendo fanboys cackle along the rim? Does the president of Nintendo commit ritual seppuku for dwindling sales as Steam fanboys sternly look on? Not at all.

Long term value in the game industry is created by making franchises that people fall in love with. Gamers still want to send Nathan Drake on adventures and shoot at the Covenant. Do you care if the box rendering Uncharted happens to have a PS logo on it?

It sure was great for Nintendo when everybody bought a Wii and then turned around and bought Zelda for it. It made them more profitable per employee than the mighty Goldman-Sachs. They rode a gravy train with biscuit wheels. But nothing lasts forever and those biscuit wheels fell off. This is a disruptive point in the video game industry. Five years from now when Ganon kidnaps Zelda gamers will still rescue her. But they will rescue her with an Android, not a Wiimote.