14 DAY TRIAL // Social gaming and indie hits have been present during 2011 but at least one analyst believes that they will be even bigger trends this year, with Facebook probably losing some social titles while the indie community might face a split.
Billy Pidgeon, who is one of the analysts looking at the video game industry or M2 Research, told IndustryGamers that, “Free-to-play mobile games will grow globally in 2012. Free-to-play casual games on mobile networks, a business model created and refined in Japan, will begin to show significant impact next year not only in other countries throughout Asia, but also in Europe and in the Americas.”
The analysts believes that the big players during 2012 will continue to be Zynga, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft but that smaller companies still have a chance to deliver breakthrough hits as long as they are able to come up with a compelling gameplay idea.
Pidgeon also addressed the issue of indie games, saying they “will grow in influence, reach and sales performance in 2012. Among the outstanding titles of 2011 were quirky games flouting the follow-the-leaders risk-averse design strategy indigenous to large publishers. Games such as Mojang's Minecraft and Supergiant Games' Bastion, through a combination of quality, value pricing and the convenience of digital distribution, had retail impact out of proportion to development and marketing budgets.”
Big gaming companies will be interested in getting a piece of the indie market and will seek to create their own small, independent teams to work on games that will be launched via digital distribution channels with limited investment in marketing and promotion.
Pidgeon believes that we will see at least another big indie hit, on the scale of Bastion or Minecraft, during 2012 and that they will come to dominate the downloadable hit lists on services like Steam or Origin.