Angry Birds’ Vesterbacka: Tablets are killing console games (video)

Frequent VentureBeat readers already know that Peter Vesterbacka, who leads business development at the company behind mobile gaming hit Angry Birds, thinks that mobile games are killing consoles. But now you can listen to his remarks yourself.

Vesterbacka spoke at a mobile gaming panel that I moderated on Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. His company, Rovio, has become the big success story in mobile gaming, with more than 100 downloads of Angry Birds and a recent $42 million round of funding from Accel Partners. Vesterbacka said this success reflects a larger trend:

I think the center of gravity [in gaming] has really shifted so it’s now clearly mobile. That’s where most of the innovation, most of the growth is. Consoles are really a dying breed, I think. And a good example — again, you can’t do one of these without mentioning Apple and the iPad. You see the lines outside the store here … They launched that a year ago, or less than a year ago, now you have the iPad 2, then 3, then 4, and so on. … The thing is, it’s very competitive. And then you have all of the other tablets, all of that.

I think that tablets are killing the consoles. That’s where games will be played. … We will see probably four generations of tablets before there is a new console, if ever there is a new console.

Tero Ojanpera, who leads services and developer experience at Nokia, was also on the panel, and he kicked off the discussion by talking about what Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft means for developers. You can see an edited version of the discussion in the two videos below. (Vesterbacka’s comments on consoles begin about at about the 10 minute point in part one.)

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