Business of the future

I published this article back at the trend club contest when it was held there, but I think that there will be people here who will be interested in my article and its discussion.
The article consists of three parts: Video Market, Monopolists and Gamedev.


Market of the future. Part 1: Video
Market Market of the future. Part 2: Monopolists and big companies
Market of the future. Part 3: Gamedev

How do you see the market for the future? Not a certain one, but in general terms, what feature of development will turn out to be uniformly true?

I will try in this article to highlight my opinion about the development of the market in the next n-years. I warn you in advance that I am not able to write beautiful articles, so I ask you not to criticize the beauty of the word.

1. Video market

Now many more remember the hype around the "Pirate Bay" and the sensational story with a fine of several million dollars for downloading two dozen songs. That and in general, the furor around all this still does not think to calm down, and, apparently, it will not pass soon. This whole story started mainly due to the fact that, according to the producers of films (if you can call them that), pirates take away some of the income from films, thereby lowering the level of income per unit of production.

But if you consider what the income of the corporation that made the film consists of?

Cash gathering + Revenue for media - Actors' work (sometimes up to half a million dollars for a series [see Dr. House]), or huge amounts for a movie, and movie stars are not hired a little, then we take away the costs of decoration, modeling, renting and so on, and in the end, the remaining money is the income for the film.

Now some small corporations have added the Donate section to their sites, that is, voluntary donations, and are adding links to the distribution of trackers. This is often practiced quite well “beyond the hill”, since the income level is much higher, and there is plenty to sacrifice.

And now, in fact, what I’m leading to: the level of development of computer technology is now quite high, and the software capabilities allow, with some dexterity, to create completely photorealistic scenes. Given the pace of technological progress, in a couple of years, achieving full photorealism will not be a particular problem, and in this case it would be most logical to render the face of the same Brad Pitt, who, thanks to IT, will become forever young on the screen of your (holographic) TVs. If you subtract the cost of renting premises, remuneration and accommodation (including meals) of stars, as well as other incidental expenses, and hiring more professional modelers and their greater number, it will be possible to "make" films at times cheaper and scenes of almost any complexity.

As a result, given that piracy does not want to be eradicated under any pretext, and to all this, the presence of elementary logic among producers, we can assume that in the next ten years the modesty of the budget of the film will not be a minus, but rather the biggest plus of the film (in economic and esthetic plan) and it may well turn out that the glorified 20th century & warner bros. They will live for the sale of HQ video for lovers of high-quality video at home and in the cinema, as well as donor donations from viewers (yes, exUSSR will not be so active on donations because of the financial situation of these countries), but most of the viewers can afford small expenses.

Summing up, I can assume that the video is moving closer to virtual reality and there it will "settle."

2. Large companies

Nowadays, there are quite a few corporations / companies that in the process of their development (thanks to the use of advanced technologies) have captured a large part of the global or territorial market, but still quite extensive. Well-known examples of “monopolists”, if I may call them that, are Microsoft (Windows OS development), Apple (currently it uses very advanced technologies and thanks to its marketing has a fairly wide audience of fans), and in the world of travel - the same British Airlines , and other corporations.

The speed of development of companies in real time is several times longer than usual, that is, those “steps” that usually take about two years for small or other companies can take about two decades.

However, as it should be, absolutely all corporations try to offer their products to the consumer as profitably as possible, which leads to improvement and modification to meet the requirements of us, as consumers, while at the same time trying to simplify the use of their products as much as possible. A vivid example is Apple with its iPhone product.

This “law” applies to virtually all organizations around the world, as longings are related to people around the world. One of these aspirations is the desire to unify everything, to create a single product model that is right in terms of usability and ideality, and it is easier to idealize your creation. This desire, due to technological progress, will make it possible to diversify with products (read goods, services) as close to ideal as possible. The proximity to the ideal, together with the mass standardization of certain elements of the production sphere (and the emergence of uniform mass standards) will lead to the fact that monopolistic companies located in geographically different or neighboring territories will no longer need competition, because with the most equal costs for the production of goods of the same quality can only be won who will put a lower price for their services (and an unreasonable price race can lead to inflation or the manufacturer himself may go bankrupt). Based on the laws of logic, the most correct decision in this situation would be to unite monopolistic corporations into a single concern, covering vast economic areas.

De facto, the desire for the best and the similarity of products (services, products) are starting to show themselves right now, a vivid example of this is the unification of British British Airlines with Italian Iberia, as well as an example from Ukraine - the unification of leading channels (ICTV, St. Petersburg, “ New ”, etc.) into a single concern.

Based on the foregoing, we can summarize that, presumably in the next n decades (depending on the pace of development), it is very realistic to merge leading production companies, as well as leading IT companies (MS, Apple, Linux foundation) in view of the pursuit of ideal and opportunities to translate it into reality. The fate of small companies depends only on their strategy and ability to develop at such a "jumping" pace as science is developing now.

I would also like to add, if we talk about companies that are trying to save money on everything, as well as inventing unnecessary tricycles, they are simply doomed to failure and the company has few chances to stay afloat, and even then it is possible after restructuring the company with high financial costs.

In order to exclude “holivary” in the comments I’ll say that Microsoft’s policy does not apply to loss-making, since their strategy for releasing operating systems can be approximately described as follows: “bad OS-> good OS”, recall WinVista, Win7; WinMillenium, WinXp; Win95, Win98.

3. Gamedev

One of the most common recreation methods, of course, is playing computer games (we know that games have long been available not only on computers). The history of electronic games begins back in 1978 with the company Nintendo, which created its first game console. Further, some games from Nintendo appeared in the Soviet Union, somewhat redone for Soviet children. Developing gradually, by the beginning of the 21st century there were quite popular at that time eight-bit consoles Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Dendy. Probably many remember game clubs with rows of Sony PS1 and stacks of discs in the cashier’s safe :) Actually, at about the same time there were already pretty decent three-dimensional games that could well compete in terms of graphics and gameplay with “set-top boxes”, but the excitement of the consoles was more, after all. In about ten years,

What can the gaming industry expect in the foreseeable future? After all, game-producing companies also have very high income for games (which costs a monthly WoW subscription or recent sales of Modern Warfare 2). The gaming industry cannot dry out as such - fresh ideas are constantly being implemented, as well as in recent years there has been a fashion for adaptation or reprinting of old games.

Some reprints turn out to be successful (The first parts of Prince of Persia, Sonic the Hedgehog), some not so (The latest edition of the Prince). Some companies, such as Blizzard, have very painstakingly set to work and using the right marketing line to continue the line of their games, for years detailing the graphics and plot of the games (Diablo III, WoW: Cataclysm, and, of course, StarCraft II). But all modern games that have a PC or a set-top box have one significant drawback: every year they require more and more resources (RAM, ROM, Video), and this entails increasing material costs. Do you remember how, before, while working under DOS, they fought for every kilobyte of memory? And what are such examples of work worth now, such as 3D models under DOS weighing only 256 bytes (!), Using only processor resources, and the game .kkrieger (http: //www.theprodukkt. com / kkrieger), which takes up only 96 kilobytes and is fully written in ASM. But this game will provide you 10 minutes of a full-fledged Quake 3 style game with special effects, music and textures written all in the same assembler. According to the developers, if everything was written by traditional methods, the game would take about 300 mb!

What do we have? If the games were written on ASM, we could now sit on the same hardware for about 10 years and play games with Stalker or Crysis graphics, but instead we have Blue-ray discs for PS3 and games weighing 10 or more gigabytes for PC and to all this, the need to update hardware every 3-4 years, since it is morally obsolete, although it may still work for years to come.

Why is that so? Because all this is beneficial to developers. Yes, new technologies are being developed, workstation productivity is improving (but why! Improve software performance!), And in the end we have what we have - due to increased productivity, software products are formed that use more and more resources, and so on. Perhaps in 5 years we will consider a 500TB hard drive the norm? 1000? But all these are empty words, what can I say that a small handful of people can not change. Actually about the games:

Recently, Microsoft inc. Natal technology has been developed that allows the use of motion tracking without the use of any sensors or visual markers. The first she appears on their consoles (Xbox). This is a significant step forward from the Nintendo Wii, which uses a remote control with an accelerometer as a manipulator, and a huge leap from other video consoles and PCs. Most likely, in the future, MMO shooters like Battlefield and CoD will be held like this: put on a helmet, underpants, took a gun-gamepad, a map scanned from Google maps becomes a location, and statistics are displayed on the helmet visor. All this is closer than it seems, and Natal technology and the current desire to minimize everything makes it real in the next 5 years.

Maybe Sony, with their consoles like PSP, will be able to stay on the market for a while until some new developments appear, but consoles like PS2, PS3 will become just an anachronism. Now Nintendo is already selling gadgets for games with physical activity (dumbbells, bicycles ...), and in the future it will most likely be quite ordinary to go over the morning cross and, having “killed” a dozen virtual mobs, get a level in another MMORPG.

Moreover, it is already practiced to create games for Windows Mobile and other platforms using GPS navigation to search for "mobs", "loot" and other game players (see Pacman on the streets of America).

I don’t think it’s worth talking about monetization, since pirates and crackers have always been and always will be. Almost any protection system can be circumvented, it takes only time (or money). Nowadays, I consider Steam to be the most successful protection system. Valve produces great games, and having bought them at very low prices, you can play at least your whole life (and their games are worth their gameplay, which L4D and TF2 are worth), but you can play even with Crack's Steam client only on pirated servers (and even that does not always work).

Maybe while I was writing this article, geniuses from Nintendo or Microsoft had another crazy idea and they are trying to realize it :) Who knows, the future is near. One has only to open his eyes and lend a hand.