My prediction would be a console interconnected with internet and home computers, the pillars I mentioned ealier; network terminal, media player and gaming should be continued. But a more thorough integration of internet connectivity in both communication and social contact will be key in convincing consumers to switch to the new console.

Backward compatibility will be an issue, but as we’ve seen with the current generation of consoles, it will not stop the masses from adopting the new platform.

When he released Counter-Strike in 1999 together with Jess Cliff, Half-Life was already a best-selling title, but the addition of Counter-Strike made Half-Life a gaming platform and it went on to sell 9.3 million units!

After leaving Valve he started working on the new game in 2008, only after finding a new investor was he able to leave his parent’s basement and start developing for real with his small team of developers.

Valve has cancelled the development of Counter-Strike 2, and it might just be that Tactical Intervention will be the game that is a real follow-up to one of the biggest gaming, and certainly e-sports, titles ever!

From the first MUD Shadow of Yserbius to the 12 million subscriptions World of Warcraft has today, the MMO market on the PC represents almost the entire growth of the PC as a gaming platform. The MMO’s competed with everything available on PC’s at that time and Alexander tells us it is going to do exactly the same for the console.

There are a few problems with their plans; one of them being the difficulty of developing on the PS3, opposed to developing for the Xbox360, so Alexander says developers should develop for the PS3 and then port  to the Xbox360, which is suppossed to be a lot easier! He publishes a great list of problems on his slides, which you’ll find in the gallery below. But the other would be the following: For the PC, you would only pay a monthly fee to play the game, for the Xbox you would pay a fee for Xbox Live and then also for the game. Casual player will say it’s too expensive, while hardcore players will have a PC game for sure.

I’m convinced consoles will remain a big part of gaming, but the MMO market will probably stay best, played at the PC with a full keyboard and all its options.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said:

What we’ve announced at Blizzard is that we have Starcraft II coming, Diablo has been in production… and a new, unannounced MMORPG that has a little more broad appeal

So the new title will NOT be a competitor to World of Warcraft, they will try to find an additional audience. To make sure this happens, Jeff Kaplan, the World of Warcraft game director, has been moved towards this brand-new property.

The upcoming changes to Battle.net; Battle.net 2.0, will also be incorporated in the new MMO, so the upcoming and current Blizzard titles; Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft and now the unnamed new title, will all be woven together on one platform. Adding cash play and more rewards and recognition systems will likely expand their audience even more, if they manage to integrate it all, it will make for one hell of a platform!

In an earlier post I talked about the ESWC bankruptcy; three in a row and there is just one team that has managed to do just this. Through its leadership in many fields, most notable Counter-Strike, it was able to launch the SK Insider service, based on the gamers.nu model of having aspiring pro gamers pay for the privilege of  learning more about the game and their idols. 15% of the teams revenue is said to be derived from this income stream. This may not seem much but a team fielding 33 players with serious salaries, not all of them full-time but still, their overhead must be pretty big, not even mentioning the 10 full-time employees.

I think they are showing the way for gaming teams to go forward. Think about the american franchised based sports, NBA/NFL/NASCAR, and you know what I mean. Most of their income is received through sponsorships, but a solid amount of income is generated by fan-based services and merchandise.  They are one of the founders of the G7, not one of the best efforts around, but still a player-oriented organization working towards a standard e-sports practice in tournaments and competitions globally.

One of the owners has just done an interview with HLTV.org. Check it out over here. Andreas “bds” Thorstensson

More information can be found on their website: www.sk-gaming.com

- To start gaming, someone only needs a computer in his house, something that’s seen as a requirement to function in this society
- The availability of games is only growing (iPhone, wireless internet, etc.)
- A greater variety of games is released every year
-  Game interface is ever changing; who could’ve imagined the Wii a few years back? or the Natal?
- Integration of gaming in our daily lives; friends meeting on WoW or for a game of FIFA is not strange or uncommon anymore

Sure, you’ll say, gaming will be big. But what will this mean;
1. Gaming will be basic.
2. The question will not be whether you play or not, it will be what you play and when.
3. The top gaming titles, IP’s, will have turnovers much larger than any other form of entertainment.

It is hard to say where professional gaming (e-sports) will be, what a game will look like or even how a game will be operated in 10 years time. But what I do know is that gaming will be growing for all the years to come. Which is why I personally want to be involved. Do you?

A few weeks ago, Danish team Meet your Maker also went bankrupt, leaving Dutch gaming legend Manuel ‘Grubby’ Schenkhuijzen without an organisation. It seems worser times are still to come, because the recession only just set in; resulting in lacking or lower sponsor budgets in a very top-heavy market. But is this really not their fault? I don’t think so!

In a market that is only based on corporate sponsoring, it was bound to happen some time. The companies going bankrupt in the past few months were not the strongest few in the bunch; they based their growth upon the marketing budgets allowed by the big-budget sponsors, not on the growth of the market itself.

Neither of these companies would’ve been able to get to the position they were in without the sponsoring of big companies;  they were building a service for gamers, that apparently wasn’t good enough for enough people to pay for!

Crude? Perhaps, but the current market conditions seem to agree with me. The only organisation still standing, and going strong, is the Electronic Sports League, a company that was projecting to be 60% consumer based in terms of revenue when I talked to them 3 years ago. Who knows what they’ve accomplished by now!