WildTangent: Consoles will be dead by 2020

Alex. St. John, the boss of online gaming network WildTangent, has said that the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii will be looked back upon as the last successful generation of games consoles.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that St. John told a Casual Connect audience:

“I am going to make some outrageous claims today. And then I will attempt to substantiate them. Feel free to disagree with me. Just remember, that I am right.”

St. John then called the console market "extremely fragile" which ‘has been subject to major collapses over the years’.

He added: “We are looking at the last generation of consoles right now. I am going to predict to you that the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market.”

In addition, St. John noted that the big game console makers will face major challenges in making the transition to a market where people want to buy, develop and play games online.

That also goes for the big publishers, with St. John saying they have a handicap when it comes to producing online games:

“Everything they know how to do is wrong,” he commented.

“They start in a well. They think that brand matters. They think that their marketing expertise matters. They think that a pile of art work and a box matters.

"They have got a bunch of people paid huge salaries with years of expertise who would never dream of firing themselves because they have got the wrong domain expertise.

“And so Disney, for example, would never have funded the $200 million project to build Club Penguin, but boy they paid $700 million like little b****** to buy it after it hit the market...

"So the weird thing is that the expertise and the skill set to create these games - they are not really rocket science to make - it is just an entirely new mentality. The big budgets and the money and all the stuff these companies have that are entrenched are not an advantage, they are an encumbrance.”