Our Fun Future

The Challenge of Competition

While none of these ideas intrinsically threatens the success of the games industry itself, taken together they suggest something very important: the games market has just become more competitive. Not only well capitalised, these new entrants have a vision for how they will compete for user time and attention. Fun will be more prevalent than ever, but EA may no longer be the dominant brand associated with the idea.

Now, I'm not suggesting the imminent collapse of the traditional games industry. On the contrary, as a whole we're better able to deal with these changes than most traditional media sectors. But while in previous expansions - particularly casual - the net effect was to substantially grow the market for games, the jury's out in this case.

It's possible that the Fun Future envisioned by banking and auto giants will complement and reinforce games revenues. But it's also possible that these applications siphon away consumer interest and attention, eroding their desire for explicit game play.

I am confident that if the mainstream games industry doesn't engage with the idea of Funware, it risks marginalisation at the hands of its new competitors. The only difference this time will be that nearly every company will be angling for consumer attention using fun, instead of the games industry simply stealing TV watchers and book readers.

Were it to happen, this would be quite an ironic bend in the road for us. At the first GDC I worked on in 1998, we struggled mightily to get mainstream media attention for the games industry as a whole - "It's just for kids".

In the short span of twelve years, we've done a remarkable job of indoctrinating society in a game-like worldview. We've made games so commonplace, so realistic and so accessible that the idea of games everywhere, all the time, really doesn't seem far fetched.

But if we are not the architects of this Fun Future, it will be designed, built and sold without our involvement. In other words: endgame.