Games consoles will be dead in 10 years, says St John

WildTangent boss Alex St John has told the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle that the current generation of consoles will be the last, making the prediction that video game consoles will be "extinct" by 2020.

"We are looking at the last generation of consoles right now," he said, talking at the event this week. "I am going to predict to you that the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market."

Big games publishers are also going to get caught out in the coming years, said the exec.

"Everything they know how to do is wrong," he said. "They start in a well. They think that brand matters. They think that their marketing expertise matters. They think that a pile of art work and a box matters. They have got a bunch of people paid huge salaries with years of expertise who would never dream of firing themselves because they have got the wrong domain expertise.

"And so Disney, for example, would never have funded the $200 million project to build Club Penguin, but boy they paid $700 million like little b****** to buy it after it hit the market... So the weird thing is that the expertise and the skill set to create these games - they are not really rocket science to make - it is just an entirely new mentality. The big budgets and the money and all the stuff these companies have that are entrenched are not an advantage, they are an encumbrance."

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