Microsoft Owns the Indian Game Scene

More gamers in India know the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms than any other. That being said, the mobile market here seems to still be the largest, and that isn't to say that PC gaming or PS2s are nowhere to be seen. Instead what I mean is that as far as "next gen" or any "gen" for that matter, the awareness is quite fixed on the Xbox, Xbox 360, and mobile. And really, in a market where "casual" and "mobile" games thrive, you have to wonder where Nintendo is in all of this. Even though the DS costs a bit more than a moderately nice cell phone, I suspect that many folks would be interested in such a gadget, except that there hasn't been any marketing of existing games, or research into games that might thrive here.

I was struck by a conversation with an artist here just today, where he was asking me where I thought things would be going in 4-5 years (a lot of folks wonder about this ya?). He saw an inherent weakness or limitation in the constant pursuit of polygons and photorealism. He asked, "What will games do once people get tired of everything just looking good?" While I certainly have no magic answer to this, I was amazed that the DS and Wii were not readily known to him as possible futures where pushing millions of poly's wasn't your goal, where certain kinds of user interaction was a main focus. We talked about "user created content" but also what I like to think of as group or party play, social play. What is particularly interesting is that this particular artist has only been working for a year now, prior to that the game industry wasn't something that he paid attention to, yet within that year, working on assets for next gen consoles, he's recognized a fundamental change that most gamers are hungering for.