Future business

I published this article even at the trendclub competition when he passed there, but I think that there will be people who will be interested in my article and its discussion.
The article consists of three parts: Video Market, Monopolists and Gamedev.


The market of the future. Part 1: Video Market
The market of the future. Part 2: Monopolists and Large Companies
The market of the future. Part 3: Gamedev
')
How do you see the future market? Not some definite, but in general, what feature of development will be the same true?

I will try in this article to highlight my opinion about the development of the market in the next n-years. I warn you in advance that I don’t know how to write beautiful articles, so I’m asking you not to criticize the beauty of the word.

1. Video Market

Now, many people still remember the hype around Pirate Bay and the momentous story with a fine of several million dollars for downloading two dozen songs. That and in general, the sensation around it all still does not even think to calm down, and, judging by everything, it will not pass all this soon. This whole story was struck, mainly due to the fact that, according to film makers (if you can call them that), piracy takes away some of the income from movies, which decreases the level of income per unit of production.

And if we consider what the income of the corporation that made the film consists of?

Cash gathering + Revenue for discs-Work of actors (sometimes up to half a million dollars for a series [see Dr. House]), or huge sums for a movie, but film stars are not enough to hire, then we deduct expenses for scenery, modeling, rent and so on, and as a result, the remaining money is income for the film.

Now some small corporations have added a “Donate” section to their websites, that is, voluntary donations, and add links to tracker distributions. This is practiced quite often “over the hill”, since the level of income is much higher, and there is something to sacrifice.

And now, actually, to what I am leading: the level of development of computer technologies is now quite high, and the software capabilities allow for quite some dexterity to create quite photo-realistic scenes. Given the pace of technological progress, in a couple of years, achieving full photorealism will not be a particular problem, and in this case it will be most logical to render the face of the same Brad Pitt, who thanks to IT will become forever young on the screen of your (holographic) TVs. If you deduct the cost of renting rooms, wages and accommodation (with meals) of stars, as well as other incidental expenses, and you can hire more professional modelers and more of them, you can “shoot” movies at times cheaper and almost any kind of complexity scenes.

As a result, if we take into account that piracy does not want to be eradicated under any pretext, and in addition to all this the presence of elementary logic among producers we can assume that in the next ten years the modesty of the film’s budget will not be a minus, but rather the greatest plus of the film (in the economic and aesthetically) and it may well turn out that the celebrated 20th century & warner bros. will live for HQ video sales for high-quality video lovers at home and in the cinema, as well as donor donations from viewers (yes, exUSSR will not be so active on donations due to the financial situation of these countries), but most of the viewers can afford small expenses.

Summing up, I can assume that the video tends closer and closer to virtual reality and there it will “settle”.

2. Large companies

Nowadays, quite a lot of corporations / companies that, in the process of their development (thanks to the use of advanced technologies), have captured most of the global or territorial market, but still quite extensive. Quite well-known examples of “monopolists”, if you can call them that, are Microsoft (Windows OS development), Apple (currently uses very advanced technologies and, thanks to its marketing, has a rather large audience of fans), and in the world of travel - the same British Airlines and other corporations.

The speed of development of companies in real time is much longer than usual, that is, those “steps”, which usually take about two years for companies of small or other spheres, can take them about two decades.

However, as it should be, absolutely all corporations are trying to offer their products to the consumer as efficiently as possible, which leads to the improvement and modification of it to the demands of us, those of others, while at the same time trying to simplify the use of our products as much as possible. A striking example is Apple with its iPhone product.

This “law” applies to almost all organizations around the world, because the aspirations of people all over the world are related. One of these aspirations is the desire to unify everything, to create a product model that is the same in terms of usability and ideality, it is easier to idealize your creation. In connection with technical progress, this striving will give the opportunity to develop with products (read goods, services) as close as possible to the ideal. The proximity to the ideal, together with the mass standardization of certain elements of the production sphere (and the emergence of common mass standards) will lead to the fact that monopolistic companies located in geographically different or neighboring territory will no longer need competition, because with the maximum equal costs for the production of goods the same quality can be won only by the one who puts a lower price for their services (and an unreasonable price race may lead to inflation or the manufacturer itself may go bankrupt). Based on the laws of logic, the most correct solution in this situation would be the unification of monopolistic corporations into a single concern covering huge economic areas.

De facto, the desire for the best and the similarity of the goods produced (services, products) begin to have an effect now, a vivid example of this is the unification of British British Airlines with Italian Iberia, as well as the example from Ukraine - the unification of leading channels (ICTV, Stb, " New ”, etc.) in a single concern.

Based on the above, it can be summed up that supposedly in the next n decades (depending on the pace of development), it is very real to merge leading manufacturing companies, as well as leading IT companies (MS, Apple, Linux foundation) in view of the striving for the ideal and opportunities to translate it into reality. The fate of small companies depends only on their strategy and the ability to develop at such a “jumping” pace, as science is developing now.

I would also like to add, if we talk about companies that are trying to save money on everything, as well as invent unnecessary three-wheeled bicycles, are simply doomed to failure and the company has little chance of staying afloat, and that is possible only after restructuring large financial costs.

In order to exclude “holivars” in the comments, I would say that Microsoft’s policy is not a wasteful one, since we can roughly characterize their operating system release strategy like this: “bad OS-> good OS”, let's remember WinVista, Win7; WinMillenium, WinXp; Win95, Win98.

3. Gamedev

One of the most common methods of recreation, of course, is the game of "computer games" (we know that the game has long been not only on the computer). The history of electronic games begins back in 1978 with the company Nintendo, which created its first game console. Further, some games from Nintendo appeared in the Soviet Union, somewhat remade for Soviet children. Gradually developing, by the beginning of the 21st century there existed quite popular eight-bit consoles Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Dendy at that time. Probably many people remember gaming clubs with Sony PS1 rows and discs piles in a cashier's safe :) Actually, at about the same time there were already quite decent 3D games that could compete on graphics and gameplay with "platformers", but the excitement of consoles was more all the same. For about a decade that has passed since then, thanks to the high-speed development of computer technology, we have games with fairly high-quality graphics on the home PC (not so much, of course, as we would like), but the leading position, of course, is taken by consoles over the past 10 years, computers have significantly overtaken both in terms of performance in terms of video games and controller convenience (after all, it is much easier to play a manipulator / joystick on PS2-3 or gadgets on Wii than on a keyboard).

What can the gaming industry expect in the foreseeable future? After all, game companies have a very high income for games (which is a monthly WoW subscription or recent sales of Modern Warfare 2). The gaming industry cannot run dry as such - fresh ideas are constantly being implemented, as well as recently there has been a fashion for adapting or reprinting old games.

Some reissues are successful (first parts of Prince of Persia, Sonic the Hedgehog), some are not very (Last edition of the Prince). Some companies, such as Blizzard, very painstakingly go to work and use the right marketing line to continue their line of games, working on the graphics and plot of the games for years (Diablo III, WoW: Cataclysm, and, of course, StarCraft II). But all modern games that are on a PC, that there is one major drawback to the console: every year they require more and more resources (RAM, ROM, Video), and this draws more and more material costs. Do you remember how, while working under DOS, you fought for every kilobyte of memory? And what are such examples of work now, like 3d models under DOS weighing only 256 bytes (!), Using only processor resources, and the game .kkrieger (http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger), which takes only 96 kilobyte and completely written in ASM. But this game will provide you with 10 minutes of a full-fledged game in the style of Quake 3 with special effects, music and textures written all in the same assembler. According to the developers, if everything was written by traditional methods, the game would take about 300 MB!

What do we have? If games were written on ASM, we could now sit on the same hardware for about 10 years and play games with Stalker or Crysis graphics, but instead we have Blue-ray PS3 blanks and games weighing 10 or more gigabytes for PC and all this need to update hardware every 3-4 years, because it is morally obsolete, although it can still work for years without a break.

Why is this so? Because all this is beneficial to developers. Yes, new technologies are being developed, the productivity of workstations is improving (but why! Improve software performance!), And as a result we have what we have - due to increased productivity, software products are being developed that use more and more resources, and so on. Maybe in 5 years we will be considered the norm of a 500TB hard drive? 1000? But all these are empty words, what to say that a small group of people cannot change. Actually about the games:

Recently, Microsoft inc. Natal technology was developed, allowing the use of motion tracking without the use of any sensors or visual markers. The first she appears on their consoles (Xbox). This is a significant step forward from the Nintendo Wii, which uses a remote control with an accelerometer as a manipulator, and a huge leap from other video consoles and PCs. Most likely, in the future, MMO-type shooters like Battlefield and CoD will be carried out: put on a helmet, underpants, picked up a gun-gamepad, the map scanned from Google maps becomes a location, and statistics are displayed on the visor of the helmet. All this is closer than it seems, and Natal technology and the current desire to minimize everything makes it real in the next 5 years.

Maybe Sony with their prefixes like the PSP will be able to stay on the market for some time until some new developments appear, but consoles like PS2, PS3 will become just an anachronism. Now the company Nintendo sold gadgets for games with physical activity (dumbbells, a bike ...), and in the future, most likely, it will be quite an ordinary thing to run through the morning cross and, having "killed" along the way with a dozen virtual mobs, get a level in next MMORPG.

Moreover, it is already practiced to create games for Windows Mobile and other platforms using GPS navigation to search for "mobs", "loot" and other players in the games (see Pacman on the streets of America).

I don’t think about monetization, since pirates and crackers have always been and always will be. Virtually any security system can be circumvented, only time (or money) is needed. In our time, the most successful system of protection is Steam. Valve produces great games, and by purchasing them at very low prices, you can play at least your whole life (and their games are worth their gameplay, which L4D and TF2 are worth), but you can even play with the Crack Steam client on pirated servers (and that does not always work).

Maybe while I was writing this article, the geniuses from Nintendo or Microsoft had another crazy idea and they are trying to realize it :) Who knows, the future is near. Just open your eyes and stretch your hand.