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COO and executive VP William "Bing" Gordon of Electronic Arts participated in a "blue ribbon" panel recently, together with Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot, Microsoft's Peter Moore, IGN's Dale Strang, and DirecTV's Steve Roberts. Dubbed the MI6 conference's "Gaming 2010," the panel of industry "experts" were to project where gaming is headed for the next five years.
For Gordon, the future of interactive entertainment will be completely over the Internet. By the year 2012, Gordon predicts that the market will be divided into three major groups: the marketers, the new generation of developers, and the new generation of gamers.
Marketing will soon be turning back into its roots. Gordon mentioned that products are now being revised based on daily customer feedback. Addressing attendees, he encouraged aspiring "hall of fame" marketers to be more involved in the marketing process and take into the account the industry's focus on user telemetry and feedback data.
The next generation of game developers are constituted by the college students of today's generation. By the near future, many of them would be pursuing their dream to create a game just like they see on television. But Gordon pointed out that other new developers would like to develop games that are free and more real-world-relevant.
And then there will always be the last portion of developers who would like to make games short and enjoyable. Casual gaming, according to Gordon, will have to be subject to proper "monetizing," which is no surprise given that this claim is coming from the advocate of microtransactions.
The third major group would remain to be the adolescents in high school. In his view, gamers of the current generation want "interruptible, multitaskable media." Gordon added, "Personalizable and customizable are somewhat different. We're trying with games like Spore and Tiger Woods to build games on this new foundation. We're learning on the fly."
He recommends to the attending marketers to begin hanging out with the college group to see what games they'd like to develop in the future, and then talk with high school students about innovative ways in using the Internet.
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