Will Wright is currently working at the fringes of the gaming industry, creating apps with his new company (currently in stealth mode) called Syntertainment. He wants to work on software that is changing the industry and realizes gaming’s potential.
“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,” Wright said. “The fact that it’s now ten thousand Darwinian developers out there with no restrictions on what they do, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas . . . 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.”
To Wright, the major innovations will come from mobile software. “There will be some innovation there, but the mobile/tablet market feels like a wider frontier to me,” he said. “I think it’s because you’re not necessarily stuck in the living room; you’re untethered. The world can become your playfield.”
Going forward, Wright foresees even more disruption for the industry. “There’s going to be at least five more years of that,” Wright noted. “The future is becoming less predictable.”
Source: GamesIndustry International
