Silicon Knights' Dyack: Social gaming is going to "crash very hard"

Farming villes and clicking cows may be all the rage right now, but Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack - whose un-blunted words can be legally classified as a lethal weaponry - doesn't think the trend's here to stay.

"[Social gaming] is damaging traditional gaming for sure but... how it’s going to work out is anyone’s guess. The trend that I see is it’s probably going to be one of the biggest bubbles and explosions that our industry's seen in a long time and I think when it crashes it’s going to crash very hard. I don’t think there’s an economy there," Dyack told IndustryGamers.

"And right now you’re seeing a lot of influx in venture and you’re seeing a lot of excitement and a lot of pie in the sky ideas, but when games actually have to start showing pure revenue and real ‘here’s how much we made and here’s how much it cost’ ...I think that industry is going to not last very long."

He also mentioned major publishers in the triple-A gaming space, claiming that many of them are silently battling social gaming's slimy tendrils. He then concluded by getting to the heart of the matter: social games tend to not be very, you know, fun.

"I tried playing FarmVille, I really did, but it’s not my cup of tea," he said. "And I’m not saying that FarmVille’s a bad game but as a gamer who's played games all my life, I know what kinds of games I want to play. I play games every day and I’m always trying new stuff. Our golden rule is we make games that we want to play ourselves and I just look at those [social] games and those are just games I don’t want to play for whatever reason. I just think that they're not a good use of my time versus quality."

So then, you probably shouldn't expect Two Humans (Two Hundred Facebook Notifications) or Eternal Darkness: You'll Never Leave Your House Again any time soon. If you worship something, now would be the time to thank it.