The great video game crash of 2013? It could happen
As the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show comes to an end this week, one thing's apparent -- there's a video game console free-for-all happening that, SuperData CEO Joost van Dreunen says could result in another video game crash, similar to the one that we witnessed in 1983.
"In 1983 the success of arcade games led a bunch of forward-thinking entrepreneurs to say, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if I could bring these games to the living room?" What resulted was a cluster of consoles from Atari, Magnavox, and Intellivision, amongst others, that so disastrously fragmented the market that we saw a 97% fall in game revenues. This week, CES 2013 is here with a lot of big players in the games industry unleashing new gaming hardware. It seems eerily similar to thirty years ago."
Now with the buzzworthy Nvidia Shield, Steam Box, along with the Kickstarter darlings Ouya and Gamestick, along with at least a dozen other game-centric handheld devices, van Dreunen says there is the potential for massive fragmentation, which will have a negative impact on the quality of games.
"The danger is that developers will clamor to build for all these new devices, creating an atmosphere like that of the early '80s aimed more at pushing out a title to every device than making solid games."
van Dreunen then backtracks, saying that the the next Xbox, PlayStation, et al, might not lose their grip on the gaming public just yet, thanks to their exclusive blockbuster games, which have yet to find any serious 1:1 competition in mobile games.
SuperData: Are we headed for the video game crash of 2013?
