The DeanBeat: The Platform Awakens

When a company launches a new platform, it’s a big undertaking. You have to craft your new technology into a consumer product. Then you have convince developers, who are the canaries in the coal mine, to support it. If the canaries die, big trouble lies ahead. Winning over those developers takes more than money or a good sales pitch. You have to inspire them.

I remember one of the most inspirational moments in gaming history, when Microsoft’s Ed Fries tried to convince developers to support the original Xbox because it would enable games to become a true art form. Back in 2001, he said, “If we focus on making art, not just entertainment, then I think for the first time we’ll deserve to speak to the mass audience, and inherit our rightful place as the future of all entertainment.”

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Fries was talking about leaving the cartoon world behind and embracing the destiny of amazing storytelling, realistic imagery, and true artistry. He wanted to make games that were more cinematic than the movies. Games went on to grab the mass audience that Fries wanted. PC, mobile, and console games reach more than a billion people. But it’s a stretch to say that they have taken over entertainment and fulfilled their destiny.

Maybe the next platform will deliver that.

This is a tantalizing thought, and it is why we have called our GamesBeat 2016 event theme “The Platform Awakens: A new hope for the game industry.” Virtual reality has burst into the market on multiple platforms — the Samsung Gear VR, the HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift. We hoped that VR would take off the way that the first iPhone did, inspiring a new generation of game creators a decade ago.

This once-in-a-decade, or once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity is here again. Everyone is experimenting, from traditional console players adapting to this new platform to the new VR startups. We have seen huge platform investments from the likes of Facebook, Google, Valve and HTC, and Samsung. All of this energy has poured into VR. The systems have launched. And yet, we don’t have our killer application.

It turns out that we may have missed something. Pokémon Go. It took us by surprise, propelling the platform of augmented reality — or perhaps the less lofty-sounding location-based gaming — into the stratosphere. It has seized our attention and gotten us walking again, strolling with our families and making new friends in the park. It has gotten gamers off the couch. Maybe the magic platform is that smartphone that is now everybody’s pockets. Maybe that great big piece of art — like the beautiful and epic Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End — isn’t as important as that simple little app that provides a temporary diversion from our worries of the day.

Maybe we shouldn’t have left that cartoon world behind?

I don’t know the answer, but I love hearing discussions about the business and art of games. I hope that John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic Labs and the man whose 20 years of effort turned Pokémon Go into an overnight success, can inspire us to embrace augmented reality. He’s got the biggest game right now, but can he give the best speech? We’ve got 105 speakers talking at GamesBeat 2016 about what inspires them to create and succeed. Maybe Hanke has all the answers.

Or maybe someone else does.

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Maybe the real inspiration will have to do with something altogether different from Pokémon Go. It may come from Michael Condrey, the cofounder of Sledgehammer Games, one of Activision’s Call of Duty studios. As a white male in a position of power, he has seen the importance of diversity. Megan Gaiser, the co-CEO of Spiral Media Ltd. and principal of Contagious Creativity, believes that diversity leads to creativity, and vice versa. So maybe Condrey’s studio can get its critical spark of creativity from people who have diverse backgrounds.

You never know what will inspire you, but you have to hear the ideas first. That’s why I think it’s important for the leaders of the game industry to come to our event at Terranea, an inspirational resort on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles. We’ve tried to gather all the right people in the room to cook up the right talks and ideas and creative leadership to move the industry forward and find the perfect platform.

I encourage you all to drink from the well of creativity. We don’t need exploitative business models, fearful investors, cloned games, outrageous user-acquisition costs, an “indiepocalpyse,” sequels and reboots, and uninspired gameplay. We don’t need game developers to think about the millions of games withering in the app stores due to lack of discovery. We just need them to think about every game they create as precious, as a work of art, as a new child.

As you can see from my vacation pictures in this article, I went on a trip to Maui recently with my family, and it inspired me to think more about the beauty of the world. You should all create worlds of your own with the same kind of beauty.

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Our job is to get game makers to dream big, get business people to appreciate the value of those dreams, and propel everyone to work together to turn those dreams into a well-executed reality. If our speakers can get us all to focus on that, then we’ll move a step closer to that destiny that games are meant to deliver.

I hope you’ll join us at Terranea. The time to awaken is now.