wild-tangent posts

You may remember that Alex St. John, the founder and head of the downloadable games company Wild Tangent, believes that game consoles are on their way out and that PCs will become the dominate game platform eventually. Now the Venture Beat web site reports that another head of a downloadable game publisher, Playfirst CEO John Welch, has some thoughts along the same line as as St. John, saying " I think the console is going to be over as we knew it previously. They're expensive to make, there is no real need for them."

Part of Welch's reasoning is due to the success of Nintendo's Wii console, saying, "The most successful, most difficult to acquire console in this generation is at least a generation old in hardware." He added, "How much would it cost to integrate Wii-like technology into a set top box, if anything even needs to be specialized? What we really need are more standards around the input devices." So does that mean the PC is going to be coming back as a major gaming platform. Not so far, according to Welch. " I think there will be components that will make it look like a PC. But I don't think it will be the PC from the perspective of what you put on your desktop or use to access your spreadsheets."

Wild Tangent's Fate is either an offline version of Flagship Studios' MMO Mythos, or a graphics-updated version of Diablo; I'm not sure quite which. There is scant difference between the two to begin with, a fact that amused and consternated fans of Blizzard's top-down click-and-slash adventure game. At the time, Mythos was thought of as the closest that Diablo fans would get to a true Diablo MMO -- not surprising, since several members of the original Diablo development team founded Flagship Studios. At least, until Mythos get closed down before it even had a chance to crawl out of veta.

Like it or laugh at it, however, the one thing that Mythos proved was that people still love that particular type of gameplay. This is a point in the favor of Fate: now that it's nearly impossible to play either of the Diablo games on OS X without jumping through some arduous hoops, if you're in dire need of an isometric dungeon crawl, then Fate is your game.

Alex St. John is considered to be something of a maverick in the gaming industry. An intelligent maverick, perhaps, but a maverick all the same. Recently St John, the founder and CEO of downloadable games publisher Wild Tangent, has made some noise with his beliefs that game consoles will be dead in their current form after this generation.

It looks like St. John has softened his stance on that score but only by a little. Our sister site Game Daily reports that in a speech at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this week, he stated that the current generation of game consoles will be the last to be considered successful and, " . . . if future generations are pursued, they'll fail" St. John feels that game consoles will be extinct by 2020 and that PC games run by microtransactions are the new wave of the future. That'scertainly an interesting proposal; we will see in a few years if St. John is proven right.