The future of video games platforms

There’s a lot going on right now regarding gaming platforms, and yet while nobody really can tell what the future holds, a couple of patterns are emerging and need some explanations.

Usually crating a video game is pretty straightforward (aside from getting a good game concept and financing the full stuff) : you decide which your target audience is, select the appropriate platform i.e. Nintendo DSi or Wii for casual gaming or PS3/xbox360/PC/PSP for more engaged players and go buy the adequate game engine to serve as the ground basis of your game project. The most well-known game engine around is probably Epic’s UT Engine used in most AAA games including their own graphically mind-blowing Gears of Wars 2. The engine itself is worth about 1MUSD for a AAA game project.

But a couple of things are on the move. First of all, alternatives to those expensive engines are emerging, one of my favorite being Unity‘s which is really full featured (including physics engine and a complete dev environment) and comes at an outrageously low price point below the 10KUSD mark. Funny enough this engine enables to create browser based games while retaining all the 3D graphics and experience of regular standalone games. This shift is getting more and more popular after Id’s launch last week of Quake Live which is a multiplayer-only version of their well-known Quake title.

What’s even more interesting is that game content is being streamed over the network. Thus we can suppose that copyright issues who have been killing the PC game market might be solved through that approach. If we follow David Perry’s thoughts that games will become multiplayer-only, we might be reaching by 2010 a new paradigm in gaming and the return of games to the PC world (which has been kinda devastated by World of Warcraft domination over the last couple years).
The underlying question here will be how game engine manufacturers will adjust to this trend, will they try supporting the wider platform range or will they specialize on their own market segments and games will be bound to exclusivity over which or which platform which is the kind of situation we are heading right now.
If you’re a casual gamer yet sometimes fragger addict you’re going to need a lots of hardware platforms if you don’t want to feel frustrated ! And game developers needing to port their work to various game engines to support all the available platforms is unlikely to happen outside of very high budget productions.