Hi there,

Yesterday, Electronic Arts (known as EA), the world’s number one game developer and publisher announced it will cut 1,500 jobs out of 7,000 employees. This is major news for the gaming industry.

It’s even more interesting that on the very same day EA announced  the acquisition of an established gaming web portal Playfish for $300M.

What does this mean?

The future of gaming is online, and everybody’s starting to understand it, as brilliantly exposed in this article. While hardcore gamers still buy DVD/CD games for their consoles (and sometimes for their PCs), most casual players tend to ‘pay and play’ either on their web browser, subscribe to unlimited game download access and buy their games online directly from the console manufacturers “App Stores”: 

Xbox Live Arcade (Microsoft), Playstation Network (Sony) and WiiWare (Nintendo) and obviously the App Store for iPod Touch and iPhone (Apple) are clearly ramping up or now established sales channels for game developers.

What’s interesting for Dassault Systèmes 3DVIA is that online games are moving from 2D to 3D– it’s not a new trend but there is a clear acceleration since the last few months.  I’ll be giving a talk at the Montreal Games Summit next week about a related idea: “Building games driven by artists and small teams: are we (back) there? ”  I‘ll keep you posted.

What do you think of this trend?  How do you currently buy games and play?

Virgile

P.S. If you like this topic, you may want to take our poll on gaming and cloud computing here.  You may also enjoy my post (especially the discussion in the comments section): Cloud computing for video games . . . true or not?