This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
The non-endemics trying to break into games | This Week In Business
08.09.2023 - 16:47 / gamesindustry.biz / Shawn Layden
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
During last week's GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit in Seattle, former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden cited "the entry of non-endemics" as one of his three biggest concerns about the future of the video games industry, jokingly referring to them as the "barbarians at the gate."
The other two, if you're interested, were consolidation's impact on creativity and rising costs. But today, we'd like to dig a little deeper into the non-endemics. Who are they? What are they doing in the games space? And how might they disrupt the status quo?
To answer the first, we can hand that over to Layden, who named four prime candidates while on stage.
QUOTE | "Right now we see all the big players going, 'Oh, gaming? It's bringing in billions of dollars a year? I want a piece of that.' And so we have Google, Netflix, Apple and Amazon wanting to get a piece and trying to disrupt out industry" - Shawn Layden listing the companies he believes have the largest dollar signs in their metaphorical eyes.
So, two mobile platform holders, one retail giant that basically has its fingers in almost every other pie, and the second biggest video streaming service (dethroned last year by Disney). Let's dive into their video games efforts, shall we?
The prime example of a non-endemic struggling to enter the traditional video games space, thanks to the failure of cloud gaming service Stadia.
Announced in 2019 with no small amount of pomp and circumstance (we still remember the GDC street display putting the Stadia controller alongside other hyped innovations that ultimately fell flat: the Dreamcast, Nintendo's Power Glove, and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600), Google positioned its cloud gaming service as a platform in its own right.
QUOTE | "The next generation is not in a box" – Phil Harrison, former VP president and general manager at Google, hyping up Stadia to attendees at the grand unveiling.
QUOTE | "It's a fundamental and, I passionately believe, an inevitable and one-way direction that the industry is moving" – Harrison telling GamesIndustry.biz the very next day that this was the beginning of the end for consoles, a prediction we will never tire of hearing.
As we all know, it didn't work out that way.
STAT | 1,045 – Number of days between Stadia's launch on November 19, 2019 and Google's announcement on September 29, 2022 that the service would be shut down.
Not even three years after its debut, the writing was on the wall for Stadia and by extension Google's
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21.09.2023 / 19:29
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21.09.2023 / 19:13
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19.09.2023 / 03:11
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pushsquare.com
19.09.2023 / 00:43
New PS5, PS4 Games This Week (11th September to 17th September) - Guide | Push Square
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pcgamer.com
18.09.2023 / 20:31
This week is an excellent time to watch the Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime
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18.09.2023 / 19:13
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gamesindustry.biz
15.09.2023 / 15:25
Unity's self-combustion engine | This Week in Business
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.
gamesradar.com
15.09.2023 / 13:07
The 7 best new movies and shows to stream this weekend
Welcome to the weekend – and to another batch of recommendations of all the best new streaming releases. It's a big week for movies, with some of the summer's biggest hits now available to watch at home: Pixar's most recent release Elemental is now on Disney Plus and Fast X is now streaming on Peacock. In other movie news, El Conde, the latest film from Spencer and Jackie director Pablo Larraín, is now on Netflix, and recently released comedy Theater Camp is streaming on Hulu.
polygon.com
13.09.2023 / 21:21
This week, Ahsoka tried to do the hardest thing Star Wars has ever done
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theverge.com
13.09.2023 / 14:59
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polygon.com
11.09.2023 / 18:37
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