Shift Control: more than just keystrokes
It’s Thanksgiving weekend for our colleagues to the south, which has given me a chance to catch my breath and reflect a bit on Shift Control, our place in the market and game development in general. When I left Electronic Arts five years ago, I could have hardly imagined where I would have ended up. How my exit interview DIDN’T go:
HR director: “So Mark, what are you planning to do now?”
Mark: “I think I’ll consult for a few years, working with a variety of game developers. Then I’ll do a start-up where we build quality games for brands and marketers.”
The interesting thing is that my career path reflects what is happening to the game industry in general. Everything is changing, and probably not in a way that I would have imagined at EA five years ago. There are the usual suspects: Moore’s Law, broadband penetration and advancements in mobile phones. But the things that were harder to forecast are the ones that I find the most interesting such as user generated content, the democratization of game development due to tools such as Flash/Action Script and mods, as well as brands as content providers.
Development of games has taken a wild swing over the past 20 years starting with kids in a basement making games on floppy discs and selling them in Ziploc bags, to the rise of the monster studios with million dollar budgets creating masterworks for the next generation of consoles, to now small groups creating interesting games for niche markets or simply for their own enjoyment. It’s like the whole history of television/video compressed in time. Big game studios will have success creating the master franchises and the next big thing, while the independents can find their own path of success. Each will have it’s own distribution model, consumer base and financial parameters.
So what does it have to do with Shift Control? As we say, the name connotes more than just a reference to keystrokes; it is also a reflection on the changing dynamics of games and interactive content in general. Control has shifted to the consumer who may also now be the creator of content. Brands need to be interesting and compelling to cut through the noise created by hyperactive marketing and user generated content. Game developers need to consider different markets, consumers and financial partners.
I plan to dig into some of these areas in more detail in other postings (supported with statistics, charts and graphs because I wouldn’t be the numbers guy if I didn’t), but for now my most profound insight is that things will be different tomorrow and probably in ways we haven’t fully imagined.
Posted on 11.23.07 to Game Development, Brandworthy. Author: mark. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. No comments yet. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.
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