Will Wright, the legendary game designer behind Sim City, recently delivered his verdict on the changes currently taking place across the industry.
In an interview with Games Industry, Wright said: "I think all the console guys are running scared. Not so much because of the hardware, but because of the business models, free-to-play and that kind of thing, have shifted underneath them."
Wright sees the free-to-play business model as an excellent route for smaller, more experimental studios, as it allows them to take risks that the bigger companies can't afford to make.
"I think publishers are much more risk-averse to spending twenty or thirty million dollars on a title. The only people who could really play that game were giant publishers, and they'd be rolling the dice. They'd do 5 titles a year, and all they had to do was get one hit and it paid off all the failures."
"It is going to be more of a Zynga-type environment where people start small and try to grow it up. It encourages experimentation. I think before the only thing people were willing to bet on were sequels; that was really the only predictable genre. Now the fact that you can do a game for an extremely low cost, put it out there and see if it gets any traction is going to encourage more diversity."