Grogg(tm) from Monkey Island

I’m working on a gaming project at the moment and everyone knows I don’t need an excuse to launch into an old Lucasfilm and SCUMM speech but I saw this in the Chepstow…

It’s like it has just stepped out of “The Secret of Monkey Island”.

3. Play is social in the mainstream (2009 Trends)

• The change is who and how: Wii broke the mould and brought gaming back into the living room (like Pong was all those years ago). Even grandparents started playing once the polygon/button race was subverted.

• Collaborative, online gaming becomes more accessible building on the success of LittleBigPlanet and Spore.

• Connected casual games (broken through to the mainstream not by the likes of World of Warcraft but by the updated old-school of Scrabulous) on more mobile devices, not just via the App store.

• OnLive is the most interesting manifestation of this trend and promises to break business models (i.e. the large console game resale margins keeping retailers in business) as it unites gaming, cloud computing and faster broadband. “OnLive is launching the world’s highest performance Games On Demand service, instantly delivering the latest high-end titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macs.” Or as GameDaily more aptly put it: “As long as you have a decent broadband connection, you can play essentially any game, no matter how complex…The games all reside on a server (which can be upgraded by OnLive every six months – meaning you never have to buy new equipment) and you don’t need a souped up machine.”

Next… 4. Sitting back with broaderband

Back to…2009 Interactive Trends