The Big Fries

I'm not sure I'd call it a golden age. It was really fun. It was fun building up the PC gaming business at Microsoft and working with people like Ensemble to release Age of Empires, it was fun to build up Microsoft's console business and work on Xbox - those were really fun times.

The console business is sort of reaching the point of huge budgets, huge projects. That makes it harder to do smaller things, more innovative things. To me what's exciting is what's happening on the fringes. Maybe not even the fringes any more. Social network gaming, mobile platforms, digital distribution and how it's opening up the world to indie development.

It's sort of like Back to the Future, you know? When we were starting those projects it wasn't uncommon for the budgets to be small, a few million dollars, it wasn't uncommon for the teams to be small. Now you look at these projects that are multi-hundred person, maybe $50-$100 million budgets. But then you go to the indie world, the iOS world, and you're back to the future, back to these smaller teams.

To me what's exciting is social network gaming, mobile platforms, digital distribution and how it's opening up the world to indie development.

I think that's exciting. Part of what I talk about in my presentation is the similarity of the evolution of game genres to the evolution of people. There's a book I mention which says that if you went back in time and played evolution forward again it might not be the same. We didn't necessarily get the survival of the fittest, we didn't necessarily get the best creatures. Once certain life forms become established they're very hard to displace.

You can see that happening with certain game genres. There was a lot more diversity in the content which was available in the past, now it's down to, sort of by force, a small number of genres in the console world because they're the ones that can support $100 million budgets. The question is, whether these newly evolving platforms will follow the same path because their customers are different or the hardware is different, or just through the luck of evolution.

Whether completely different forms of play will emerge. Why is Angry Birds the game for mobile platforms. Is it because it's the best game that anyone came up with on that platform or is it a combination of several really complicated factors that have made it own this position? So now we're in this position where Angry Bird type games are a genre - it's kind of weird to think about it that way, right?

That's sort of the way these markets evolve. I guess that's some of the philosophy of the things I'll talk about in my presentation.

I'm not sure we ever believed that console games would ever get as big as they did. The console market is a lot smaller, in terms of the reach and the number of people it touches. Maybe the dollars per user will never be as big as console, but so many more users are being reached. Take a look at a company like Zynga. It's hard to say what kind of market cap Zynga has reached because it's privately traded, but it's certainly larger than EA right now. Maybe not as big as Activision Blizzard, but not that far away. Think about that.

You've already got a company that's almost as big as one of the largest in the console business. I don't see why that can't happen in the mobile space. One of the companies I'm on the board of is a company called Z2live. I've been impressed and amazed with the performance of their game: Trade Nation on iOS. I didn't look this morning but it's been kicking around the top ten grossing apps. So there's a lot of money to be made there.

Free-to-play is a really interesting model because it has such a low barrier to entry. Anybody can get into the game for free and then decide for themselves how deep they want to get into it. Then how much money you make is tied to how into it people are. That's sort of the purest model, right?

If you've got to go to the store, spend $40 on a game you've only read about in a review and I don't know if I'm going to like it or not. It's a crapshoot, right?

There's things about free-to-play I don't like too, but I think it's one of the most interesting models that's evolving right now. I think that's going to be the key to the way these cellphone platforms go forward. In that sense it's different, is I guess what I'm saying, to the console market. You're probably not going to have TV ads for free-to-play games. I don't know, maybe you will.

There you go!