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Nowadays the gaming scene is vastly different from just 5 years ago. Sure, there are still dedicated game consoles in both stationary and portable forms, as well as the gaming PCs, with their neon so bright. But besides these, somewhat classic styles of hardware, there are a swath of other devices on which a lot of people now play games. I'm of course talking about smartphones and tablet computers, the latest in personal computing.

Of course any shift in video gaming makes analysts and other speculating type of people froth and jump at the opportunity to show off what they can guess about. As they have explained things to me, the world of video games is going to look very, very different in a very short amount of time. Namely that consoles as we know them will go the way of the dodo and everybody will be playing games on their smartphones and tablet computers only. No more dedicated devices, nope siree!

Thing is, I see a lot of problems with that view on things.

Looking at it from the economical perspective alone, we see that very few companies make it big on any smartphone or tablet platform. Not everybody can be Rovio and not every game released will be the next Angry Birds. Nothing shocking about that, just common sense as far as I'm concerned. Add that people are utter and complete cheapskates that don't want to spend any money on gaming for these devices and the whole economical part of it just falls on its face. Besides, freemium is possibly the single worst thing to happen to gaming in the last 10 years, brining a whole new level of annoyance to the table.

Leaving out the ones who make games for the fun of it, there'll be a swath of garbage games flooding the app stores, rife with IP violations and obvious thefts famous game designs. You know, just as it already is on pretty much all the major app stores. So the future of gaming will be more like the wild west, akin to the situation we had before the great video games crash of 1983? Anyone remember what happened after that?

There are already a lot of games for any smartphone, but shockingly few of them are really, really good. I'm sorry, but just because games are on a smartphone or tablet computer doesn't mean I can't compare them against the best games I know. When I look at a lot of the games on smartphones and tablets each other and when compared to games on traditional games consoles, they just fall short. One button games are fine and dandy, but not every game needs to be one. They are also built to be nearly disposable and tossed away, only to be replaced by the latest shiny as soon as that comes out. Disposable video games, is that the future of the business? Just chuck out all that talk about it being an art form?

Personally I don't see the video games console as a phenomenon going away any time soon.

Author

Robert Falck

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