Carmack: Mobile Gaming To Surpass Current Consoles 119
donniebaseball23 writes "The rate at which hardware iterates in the smartphone and tablet space has allowed the technology to nearly catch up with consoles. It won't be long before we're all carrying small devices more powerful than the PS3, says Doom creator and id Software programming genius John Carmack. Speaking in an interview, he commented, 'It's unquestionable that within a very short time, we're going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles.'"
Even if that's the case, Nintendo still wants no part of it.
It's bound to happen....and again...and again... (Score:2, Interesting)
Except in special circumstances requiring very heavy lifting (research modeling, professional video/audio production, rendering, heavy duty compiling, etc) I'd imagine our "phones" will be picking up the slack and replacing *everything*...
Sounds funny, yes, but, as I get older this 'cyclical' thing apparently has something going for it.
Useless prediction (Score:2, Interesting)
I got another preduction for Carmack: More people have played MS solitaire then ALL of your games combines. So pack it in dude, you are in a dying industry!
Oh wait, several industries can exist beside each other without really impacting each other? You mean the entry of flash games did NOT kill of other forms of gaming? How odd, I was assured that X will kill Y also know as the iKiller was a sure thing!
One of the things that always suprises me about the handhelds made by Nintendo and Sony is how the games made for them are often so totally unsuitable for the platform. Early GBA games STILL came with save passwords, for those lucky enough not to know the horrors of the early consoles, that means saving your progress was NOT saving a few bits to a storage on your machine but writing down a fairly long string of random characters to be typed, oh wait no keyboard, scrolled back in when you want to resume... on a handheld...
Clearly who ever came up with that NEVER considered the game to be played in few wasted moments on the go. The 3DS is a nice device but who on earth thought this kinda 3D was useful on the go... It is already hard enough to hold the device still in a comfortable chair, in a moving bus? Forget about it.
What does this mean? Well, if many of the 3DS games are meant to be played at home, with some dedication, is this then hardcore gaming? Compared with Angry Birds? I haven't seen to many of the mobile games that are a bit deeper, more what we would consider a full price game (with the note that just because a game charges full price, doesn't make it a full price game). Could it possibly be that people who play mobile games want just a fun game for a few minutes at a time? That other gamers want something else and all this can exist besides each other with attention whores leaping from platform to platform claiming this to be the new king?
For anyone who wants to guess about the future, always consider WoW. An ancient game by now designed for obsolete hardware, yet there is no console equivelant and it still packs in the punters by the millions. Where is WoW in the console? On mobile devices? On handhelds? Until you can explain WoW, you can't make predictions on gaming.
Not because the game itself is so important but what happened to all the predictions for the end of PC-gaming? When everyone who wants a MMO has to have a PC? Even the new FF MMO is still only for the PC (crap as it is) despite its creator otherwise making only console games. It shows different platforms got their own capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Only a fool would declare one to rule them all.