Ben-DutkaThere has been a lot of talk recently about the possibility of a single-platform video game industry, where all games play on one system. Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack says this is not only "inevitable," but it's actually essential.
In speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Dyack participated in a session called, "Design: Video Games as The Eighth Art," and he said the game industry must follow in the movie industry's footsteps and "adopt a universal medium." As reported by VideoGamer , Dyack had this to say:
"Because we have the three consoles we're in this really weird state. The cycle right now for movies has become pretty well established. For video games it's become hyperbolic almost. There were 300 or so games released last November. We're in a state of performance over supply. We're making more games than consumers can possibly consume. Marketing is having a disproportionate effect over the success of games because there's so many out there people are ignoring us. Sometimes it doesn't matter if your game's good or not; if you don't have that marketing support it won't happen."
To combat this, Dyack said they need a universal media outlet rather than five or six different platforms and in the end, he says "we're being slowed down by the multiple consoles." Dyack also adds that it's beginning to cost hardware developers more and more to perform research on their next game system, and publishers find it more and more difficult to make a good profit. Nowadays, it's tough to decide where your game should go, but Dyack referenced the old days when Nintendo was dominant; back then, if you made a game for the Nintendo platform, at least you were assured of "getting about 80 or 90 percent market penetration." But nowadays, "it's a real gamble."
"The market forces are eventually going to overturn, or the publishers are going to start going out of business and no-one's going to be making games, until someone stands up and says look we're going to have one universal console, it's what it has to be, we don't want three copies or three different versions of the same game, we don't want to have something special for this controller, or some special character for this downloadable platform, we just want to make our game and we want to make money from it and we want, as entertainment developers, to create our one vision. That's eventually what's going to follow because it has to."
Hey, we just want our games; doesn't matter to us where we play 'em. However, we hope Dyack realizes that if this universal platform does happen, he will effectively kill off the fanboy regime that essentially rules the Internet…we're not complaining, of course (all of them can go suck rotten eggs, as far as we're concerned), but entire sites dedicated to fanboy "journalism" and arguments/hating ('cough' N4G, Destructoid, 'cough') will disappear. …no, wait, get that single platform in here now .
