Gabe Newell, head of the innovative and successful game software-plus-gaming platform developer Steam, was interviewed at a recent shindig put on by Silicon Valley venture capital and technologist sponsors (is Valve in play?!).
Somehow, the world of app-gaming and smartphones-as-game-platforms haven’t torpedoed Valve’s growth and financial success. More cold water thrown on that unsophisticated theory. Meanwhile, Newell had some interesting concepts on the future of game distribution and design:
Everything we are doing is not going to matter in the future. … We think about knitting together a platform for productivity, which sounds kind of weird, but what we are interested in is bringing together a platform where people’s actions create value for other people when they play. That’s the reason we hired an economist.
We think the future is very different [from] successes we’ve had in the past. When you are playing a game, you are trying to think about creating value for other players, so the line between content player and creator is really fuzzy. We have a kid in Kansas making $150,000 a year making [virtual] hats. But that’s just a starting point.
Now, this is something Apple has figured out and it’s something Nintendo has figured out but is still in the early stages of implementing– users as content-creators and value-adders. I will have my review of “Nintendo Magic” up soon which goes into this a bit more but one of the most interesting takeaways I had was the fact that Iwata discussed empowering users themselves to create content and experiences with their hardware and software that would add infinite replayability to their games. This was part of their strategy for addressing the main challenge of game-making, which is that over time your game becomes stale and boring.
Related to this, Newell discussed creating open-platforms:
In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren’t happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform. There’s a strong temptation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors’ access to the platform, and they say ‘That’s really exciting.’
Part of creating an open platform means designing something that is easy to develop for. Nintendo struggled with this with the N64 and Gamecube, systems which were technologically sophisticated and powerful, but not easy to develop games for. Meanwhile, the Sony Playstation and Playstation 2 were relatively simple to develop for. The end result? Much wider software library on the Sony systems. And it is software desirability that drives hardware adoption.
Finally, the Wiimote and its new control scheme was central to the Wii’s success and Nintendo’s strategy to expand the gaming population and allow users to enjoy new experiences. The smartphone/iPad revolution has introduced the value of touchscreen control (which, by the way, the Nintendo DS adopted prior to the smartphone revolution) which has continued with the Nintendo 3DS and which is now coming to the Wii U with the touchscreen, tablet-style game controller to be packaged with the system.
But Newell actually thinks touch is a temporary control measure and that it’s “back to the future” when it comes to the next evolution, which he sees as being more motion control-oriented again:
We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years.
Post touch, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, is a couple of different technologies combined together. The two problems are input and output. I haven’t had to do any presentations on this because I’m not a public company, so I don’t have any pretty slides.
There’s some crazy speculative stuff. This is super nerdy, and you can tease us years from now, but as it turns out, your tongue is one of the best mechanical systems to your brain, but it’s disconcerting to have the person sitting next you go blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t think tongue input will happen, but I do think we will have bands on our wrists, and you’ll be doing something with your hands, which are really expressive.
Was Nintendo ahead of its time? Will Nintendo “return to its roots” on this? Perhaps the design team is already thinking this way? They haven’t abandoned the Wiimote with the next-gen Wii U.
Personally, what Newell is saying makes sense to me. I think touch has been innovative, and for certain applications it is both clean, intuitive and as complicated as control need be. But it is not deep enough. You will not be playing Call of Duty or a modern shooter with touch alone. RPGs could be handled with touch but it would restrict some. A 3D platformer would be a boring disaster with touch. I don’t think critics of Nintendo (gamers and non-gamers alike) pay attention to details like this.
A House Rises 