On niche markets. The advantage of console is when it hits the tipover point where people benefit at scale from mass adoption. But I think the gaming market is becoming more and more a niche of niches. Skinny verticals having very disparate needs and price points.
So the industry will have to, in aggregate, adopt a Samsung model and cater to this highly fragmented market. Because you start having problems at the ragged edges once you achieve scale that can’t be spread wider by your baseline momentum. I think PlayStation is doing this by entering the next generation with a three SKU or potentially four SKU strategy.
I think this is partially achieved more so on the market by the way PlayStation is catering to the high-end and Nintendo is catering to the lower end. In and around them, there will be skinny spaces that can be occupied by the Steam Machine and Xbox Helix. Then other skinny verticals for Cloud services and GeForce now, NEX playground, other handhelds. Roblox. I don’t think any one of these things takes over. They all have their own ceiling; a quantifiable cap. No one of them has the potential to be ubiquitous. That will be the transformative thing that none of us see coming. The Holodeck or games beamed directly to our brains or some such other. My money is on the Holodeck.
And I think the market will continue like this for maybe a decade, decade and a half at most and then, just like we did in the 90s, the market will swell to a point when there are too many platform suppliers; where it decides that it will no longer support this atomic fragmentation of supply and will re-congeal in the more consolidated timeframe that we’ve seen from 2000 – 2023. No single supplier can or needs to cover all lanes. But in aggregate I think we’ll see this effort to blanket and play more man-to-man defense during this time than the zone coverage that the industry has been playing for twenty years.
Rounding Off Infinity 