Meier: Games industry set to "grow and expand"

Veteran designer Sid Meier has said today's games industry is more diverse and open than ever before, and likely to become even more so.

"There are new opportunities for smaller indie developers to make and distribute games, so we’re seeing a wider variety of games on all kinds of cool devices than ever before. That’s great for the whole industry," the famed designer told IndustryGamers.

Meier said the most most exciting thing about today's industry is how "widespread" gaming is, across demographics, devices and content, and predicted this diversity will only increase.

"The gaming world will continue to grow and expand to innovative platforms that deliver new experiences to players from all walks of life," he said.

"And all of these fun ways to play games will coexist so that those of us who love to play games will have lots of great options available wherever and whenever we want to play."

With Civilization World, Meier has moved into social game design, and is clearly enthusiastic about Facebook as a platform.

"There are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and it looks like they’re going to stay around for a while," he said.

"The good news for all of us is that there are many different ways to play games today and all of them can happily exist together, so I don’t see a reason to predict the end of social games any time soon."

Thanks, Blue.