World Cyber Games Drops Consoles And PCs In Favor Of Mobile Gaming
There’s no question that the video game market is booming, and that the world of eSports is doing better than ever. Or is it? If you ask the people behind the World Cyber Games, they’re convinced that competitive console and PC gaming is on the decline. In fact, there is only one realm of gaming that’s worth their time now. Mobile gaming.
Seeing just how close to April it is, there’s a part of me that almost thinks that this is an April Fool’s prank that got released a little too early. However, it has been confirmed by a WCG representative as accurate. It seems that the group will be putting together what they’re calling the Mobile Game-Based Festival. Here’s the full letter that was leaked:
In recent years, the gaming and IT trends have been moving so fast. In the current status of gaming and IT industry, one of the most remarkable information to us was the mobile shipments have exceeded the PC shipments.
As wide spread mobile devices, mobile gamer would rapidly increase as well. In this situation, the major PC game publishers have been expanding their investment and business in the mobile game development & publishing.
This information was very cruel to us since we had been committed to the PC-Based gaming event for long time. We have witnessed that there have been many companies and organizations who went out of business because they didn’t put effort to change. Therefore we concluded that we should create WCG’s new identity.
Under this circumstance, we made a hard decision that we should bring the mobile, new key sector in the game industry, in our event concept. Hence, WCG decided to start the Mobile Game-Based Festival.
To create the Mobile Game-Based Festival, WCG is under the discussion with the sponsors and game publishers regarding new event structure and the countries for new festival. Therefore, there will be no longer present event module, such as Pan Championship, and PC-Based National Finals. And, the official game titles of WCG will consist of mobile games.
Just looking at this, you can tell that the person making the decisions here is completely out of touch with the world of gaming. Yes, mobile devices are outselling PCs and consoles. However, most of those mobile devices are cellphones, which are not primarily used for gaming. People play games on their phones when they’re bored and have nothing else to play.
Sure, you might spend a bit of time getting all of the stars in Angry Birds, but how many people are truly competitive about such feats? I seriously cannot imagine enough of them to justify an event like World Cyber Games has put on in the past. But that’s not even the real issue. In order for an event like this to work, there has to be a following. People love watching eSports events, as shown by the vast number of people watching from home. How many people do you think are going to sit at home and stream coverage of teenagers playing games on their phones?
What separates consoles and PCs from mobile devices is their perception. When you see an Xbox, you think about gaming. When you see a sweet gaming rig, you think about gaming. When you see an iPhone, you think about sending texts and calling people.
