Shane Kim: Console gaming will never "go away completely"

It's a brave new world. Where console giants once ruled, app stores and social behemoths are setting up shop. Some console gamers, then, see their hobby as living on borrowed time. Former Microsoft big wig Shane Kim, however, doesn't feel sky chunks raining down on his head just yet.

"Will there be some impact on console gaming? I think it would be hard to say that there isn’t any impact, but I would never say that it’s going to go away completely," he told IndustryGamers.

"I think that the big console game manufacturers, they’ve all got plans for the next console generation. I think that they’re all shooting to make sure that those next versions, whatever they look like, are going to be things that are going to be compelling for the kinds of gamers, especially hard core gamers, who really enjoy that style of gaming. It’s going to be a while before you have the kind of power... in mobile platforms that can compete effectively, I think."

As a result, Kim's not sweating some big, End Times-y showdown between righteous console crusaders and the mobile menace. Rather, he thinks it's just a matter of different strokes for different folks.

"So to me it’s really about different choices for different types of gamers," he explained. "There’s different styles of games that are more popular on the different platforms and that just creates more opportunities, clearly, for more developers to create content. And the challenge is that there’s a lot of people creating mobile game content today. So how do you help that community differentiate itself from the competition and also make money in the process?"

That, of course, is a question Kim hopes to answer in his new role at mobile games group Zipline. We wish him the best of luck, because - wicked creatures that we are - we've taken quite a liking to tiny, tappable games. Also, Kairosoft actually has a controlling share in our soul now, which makes resisting its every whim somewhat difficult.