CES 2011: Social Gaming, Multiplayer Experience Panel

CES 2011 Gaming Panel, originally uploaded by zennie62.

The focus of this CES 2011 Day Two Panel is large community gaming, social gaming, and how this involves the smartphone environment. Mike Vorhaus is the lively moderator of this afternoon panel.

The Panelists: John Cahill, President & CEO of Meez Social Entertainment, Don Daglow, Created First Graphic game for AOL, lead designer on a Facebook game, Gnu Financial Director is Mike Harris, also involved in making a game called "Corporate Bloodbath." Hany Nada, is a venture capitalist, co-founder and partner, GGV Capital, and involved with a dozen gaming companies. Chris Petrovc, GameStop Director. Don Reilley is the Interactive Ad Sales Director with Microsoft, and places ads in the games played on Xbox.

How do you see see Smartphones impacting gaming? "Increased usage will take the place of plastic," Petrovic says. Vorhaus says that Daglow says that the Wii type products discourages add on products and adda "They will have a chilling effect on other types of peripherals," for games. Harris disagrees to an extent, saying that some Wii applications with a hardware component do allow additional peripherals.

The Tablet and Older People

The panel conversation turned to how games are used and the demand for them on the part of "older people," and with respect to the tablet. The general view is that Bigger is better for the older consumer.

Tablet Over Smarphone

The general advantage of a tablet versus a smartphone is real estate. There's much more space. But Nada says there's more money to be made from the smarphone because of the size of the market for it.

Trends In Game Downloading?

Trend: not full game download, but an evolution of the utility of the disk and what's placed on it. Gamestop's Petrovic explains that this is an emerging business model for gaming. "Some studies have shown that users want a 20 to 25 percent discount if they download versus disk download. Microsoft's Reilley agrees, saying that the disk isn't going away at all. Downloads of full versions of games are not the way - for them.

Nada says the problem is the mentality of the game publisher, who wants to put it all in a game box. The way, he says, is to (and this will eventually happen) is for the game to go on a cloud, and be improved as time goes on. But for today, that's not what game developers want to do.

The Maturation Of The Gamer

Nada says that it used to be that the gamer was a kid, but not anymore: "I'm a gamer," he says, "I grew up with all the games." And now he's an adult. In other words, the new gaming demographic is the older to middle aged person, as much as it is the teenager.

Stay tuned.