DOCTOR LOVE
FEW
QUESTIONS
WITH
OSCAR BARDA
As a video game specialist, Oscar Barda answered to my questions about the future of this relationship.
Do you think that, for big video games companies such as Nintendo, a mobile strategy is a necessity ?
In business, there is no obligation or necessity. The mobile is not a fate, it is a market that is full of promises, but it is almost orthogonal to the more classic market than the giants of the video game usually measure. It is the sense moreover of the schism of Ubisoft that created Gameloft when they realized that we could not serve needs of mobile market with their games. So… Yes, mobile is an advantage, not an obligation. But it can be very dangerous because in the mobile market, investments are not guaranteed. Some big compagnies run into trouble because of it (and the bigger they are, the harder they fall).
In the description of your blog Extension du domaine du jeu you write: "Where from comes and where goes the video game? What does it say on our time and which big currents cross it ?".
About this mobile consumption of video game : what does it say on our society ?
Consumption of mobile games is as much a result of the trends of our society as it is creative of trend within it. As any market, it feeds and increases.
The duration of « period » shortened, but in the big plan of the lives, those of the players of mobile games are incredibly favored.
Little by little, the human race seems to have got rid of some steps of the Maslow pyramid: our physiological and safety needs are relatively filled if we compare them with the history of the planet… But belonging, esteem and self-actualization needs remain. As a painkiller deceives our senses to allow us be operated without pain, the mobile games allow us to perform ourselves and to be esteemed by a computer for a brief moment. A Candy Crush level is only a microcomputing victory, but put end to end microcomputing victories and suddenly this journey in the subway becomes more pleasant than to think of the stress and the troubles of the everyday life.
Are the leaders of Nintendo right to be wary of the mobile game and the possible depreciation that this one could entrainer on the domain of the video game ?
Depreciation is a myth. People like or do not like, consume or do not consume with passion. And the work of a firm as Nintendo is to make sure that it can survive and develop by proposing games which awaken passions, affixing it a just price.
THE
RECOMMANDATIONS
OF DOCTOR LOVE
Do not try additional gimmick on mobile. The mobile is an interesting market, but it lack of onirism, adventure. It is possible to create sincere beauties on mobile and, with the scale of Nintendo, make that for the good of the world, rather than make a lot of evil by falling again into the cynics model of micro-payment.
To go in it completely, not by small steps and simpering, but with the full strength of their universes.
To impose a model of payment and to not to fall in the « free to play » models.
