According to the Seattle Post Intelligence, Wild Tangent’s chief executive Alex St. John thinks that consoles will be “extinct” by 2020. His substantiations for the claims are almost as silly as his prediction of the end of console gaming. The following was said at the CasualConnect conference in Seattle with a picture of Moses behind him on the screen.
We are looking at the last generation of consoles right now. I am going to predict to you that the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market.
The cited reasons for his beliefs are that stockholders won’t want the console manufacturers spending money to create new consoles, and that the TV in the living room will disappear and be replaced by some crazy Minority Report contraption with multiple screens and interactivity. Also, he claims that laptops in schools will bring a shift to the PC market as kids will begin playing more Sims expansions and Diablo knock-offs.
In fact, St. John’s entire speech led to the fact that PC gaming is beginning to take a turn for the better and will eventually dominate the industry like it used to. His focus was that digital distribution, in-game advertising, and demos are causing this massive revolution of which we are participants. Apparently, the success of the Wii means nothing to Mr. St. John in regards to his argument, as he plainly stated that Nintendo’s desire to create peripherals spells the same kind of doom that arcades went through to try to earn back the loyalty of console enthusiasts. At least, so says the spyware developer at WildTangent.
