"Manufacturing hardware is a mug's game" - Livingstone
Walled gardens will eventually disappear from games business, says Eidos life president
Hardware manufacturers will wise up to the fact that creating dedicated consoles is a futile business strategy for the future of video games, according to Eidos life president Ian Livingstone.
Discussing his personal projections for the future of the interactive entertainment business, the industry veteran suggested that the closed environments created by multiple home and portable devices will eventually disappear allowing intellectual property to spread across any and all gaming formats.
"Hardware manufacturers will finally realise the fact that manufacturing hardware is a mug's game," Livingstone told the Launch Conference in Birmingham, yesterday.
"It's all about intellectual property and I think you'll see IP moving across all platforms and all devices. Walled gardens will one day disappear."
Portable hardware will the dominant gaming devices, said Livingstone, driven by a standard language in HTML5 - something that could become bigger for web-based gaming than social networks like Facebook.
"The dominant platform for me is going to be mobile," he offered. "Android might eat Apple's lunch but a connected device allowing gaming on the move is absolutely, undoubtedly the future."
"HTML 5 is going to create a real opportunity, a single platform with a single interface. That's going to be a bigger platform perhaps than Facebook."