I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, so we’ve got some of the most advanced gaming systems you could ever expect to see, hard drives where memory is no obstacle now. Games which play like movies, consoles that can even play movies, so what is going to be the next big thing in the gaming world?
Personally I think with games with such a high price tag on them now and with us in the middle of a recession and so many out of work the gaming industry is going to have to start thinking of ways to keep those sales up or slash prices, which they don’t particularly like to do. With game rentals an option sales can only go down, unless you give the consumer a reason to keep paying $60 per game.
One way to do this would be to start giving people a chance at making some money playing games, I really don’t know why it isn’t already a big thing, it’s been done before with great success.
If you bring an average game onto the market with only a fair rating, add $10,000 prize money to the first person to solve it then you see sales start to treble and quadruple for an otherwise unpopular game.
It was done back in the 80’s when a type of game computer keyboard called the commodore 64 was extremely popular, the game was called Eureka and it was an adventure game, the first person to put the pieces together and solve the adventure and phoned the telephone number and won the money, turned out it was a 15yr old from the United Kingdom and actually won the 25,000 pounds ( uk sterling ), that’s around $50,000 give or take a few hundred.
Ok it’s a gimmick of sorts but it creates sales, and also gives gamers an extra reason for buying the game, even if they wouldn’t normally have bought it.
I do believe that this will eventually happen, it’s just who starts it off, the rest will follow suit. Let’s face it playing Resident Evil 5 was amazing, imaging how much better it would have been if there was 10K prize money to fight for, and I wouldn’t feel so guilty about spending so many hours playing my fave game 🙂
What do you think will be the next big thing in gaming?
Tony
