Competiting for Entertainment Time

The battle is on now - a whole host of new platforms and technologies; from consoles, smartphones and tablets, to social games and browser titles, to cloud gaming are competing for entertainment time and dollars. The biggest change is that games have become much more social and mainstream.

The social factor in games has become much larger, and also what it would call the interstitial factor, which is that rather than people doing what you might call session-based gaming, where I'm going to go sit in my room and play Halo for an hour, I have the opportunity to pull out Angry Birds and play for two minutes while waiting in line at Starbucks. People now use games to fill the empty slots in their life, a bit more ubiquitously.

Over the last five years it really is about the diversification, not just of platform, but of the players, the demographics. Games really used to be something that were targeted to 16-year-old boys and guys. Now we have people of all generations, genders, walks of life, playing games, a lot of them on their cell phones, or on Facebook and now the iPads. The explosion in platforms has also driven a very healthy diversification of our players audience and brings about new audiences.

Gaming used to be something that maybe you spend a couple of hours in front of your Xbox or the PC. Now gaming is something that you can pull out of your pocket and play for two minutes here or there, or check into your Facebook thing, do something on FarmVille, whatever.