New Head of Worldwide Game Studios For Sony Recognizes the Social/Casual Gaming Trend

Shu Yoshida from an interview with Dean Takahashi on VentureBeat:

We see trends toward casual and social gaming. Like SingStar, Guitar Hero, and the Nintendo Wii. All of those are bringing in more consumers to games. That’s great. Including the Nintendo DS handheld. The gamers might stay there because such games are fun. But they also might leave and stash the console in the closet until next Christmas. The whole industry has an opportunity to cater to the new audience that hasn’t played before.

Sounds like he's hedging his bets. And the fact that he name-checks Guitar Hero and the Wii as social or even casual games, suggests that Sony is still focused completely on consoles and not the online free-to-play model. Which makes sense, since as he states in the interview, his core job is to promote their platforms, Playstation and Playstation Network.

I'm not going to be expecting anything from Sony any time soon. I'm still waiting on Home, their virtual world for Playstation owners, that they announced two years ago.

Why I Love Being in the Games Industry.

Normally, I hate writing soft posts, you know those posts where the author talks about how much they love risotto, when all I really care about is their analysis of the social games industry. That is why you all subscribe to my blog, after all.

Well, there'll be no analysis today, nor talk about the finer aspects of risotto (I know you're disappointed). This is just a love letter to the social games industry.

If you give it a moment of thought, to spend your adult life creating games seems pretty trivial when compared to say curing cancer. It probably is. But it's a helluva lot more fun. Oncologists may feel free to disagree.

But honestly, would you really want to live in a world without games? I know people who never play games. I don't like them. They're boring. Their imagination has been drained. They're afraid to say fuck at work. You can often find them in the telecom industry (or so I've heard).

One of the sad truths about being in the games industry is that many of us work so hard that we don't get to play games. I've never played World of Warcraft. I'm terrified of it. I know that if I started playing it...well, let's just say that I once was so addicted to Civilization 2 that I had to destroy the installation CD. Sadly, I bought a new copy the next afternoon. Even now, if someone even mentions Persians I start to...dear god, I just gave myself a Civ craving.

Fortunately, people in the games industry have gigantic stores of imagination, enough to carry us through droughts where we can't find time to play. And guess what, imaginative people are fucking awesome. They're smart, friendly, open, funny, cool, gracious, curious...the person that deep down we all want to be, but we're afraid we're not.

Yesterday, I got to spend my day with two hundred of these amazing, imaginative people at the first ever social gaming conference, Interplay. It was a privilege, and I thank every single one of you for making our nascent industry feel like a family.

Love,

BT