Gaming “Falling Way Short” As a Medium – SimCity Creator

Speaking to GamesIndustry, SimCity creator and founder of Maxis – which he departed from years ago – Will Wright stated that gaming as medium still has a lot of growing up to do.

“I think we have an extremely powerful medium here at our disposal, and I think we’ve only realized a small fraction of its potential. It wouldn’t take too many things to really impact a lot of people. Relative to what we have as a medium, with what we could be doing with it, we’re falling way short.”

However, when he looks at the major innovations happening with smaller developers, he notes “it’s much, much more healthy than it was ten years ago, when it was a few large publishers controlling ten million dollar purse-strings.”

“I remember ten years ago at every E3 you’d walk around asking your friends ‘What’s new?…’ ‘nothing,nothing,nothing,'” Wright noted. “Now, every week somebody tells me about some weird little app that came out.

“Not big budget, but they’re interesting and fun out of the box. It’s a much more level playing field, I think. They are putting marketing dollars behind these things, but still it’s not five big publishers controlling ten titles a year.”

Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Need for Speed, Madden…did we miss anything? Regardless, the number of smaller titles, newer titles coming up is definitely much better now than 5 years ago – thanks largely in part to efforts from mobile app developers and crowd-funded projects.