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By Howard Wen Gamasutra
December 11 2007

Analyze This: Divining The Next Guitar Hero-Style Phenomenon

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Analyze This: Divining The Next Guitar Hero-Style Phenomenon

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They are the professional analysts whose job it is to research, keep track of, advise their clients, and opine to the media about the gaming business. Analyze This cuts right to the chase.

Rather than reporting on a subject, and throwing in quotes by analysts to support or refute a point, Gamasutra offers up a timely question pertaining to the business side of the video game industry and simply lets the analysts offer their thoughts directly to you. Each person's opinion is his own and will (probably) not necessarily agree with their fellow colleagues'.

Music games have grown from a niche to one of the most dominant genres in 2007. Rock Band and Guitar Hero III are fighting the most publicized battle of this holiday season. The third installment in the Guitar Hero franchise launch netted Activision's biggest sales week ever for the company.

So we asked David Mercer of Strategy Analytics, Jesse Divnich of The simExchange, and Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies:

What opportunities are there for other emerging niche genres?

What will be the next Guitar Hero-style phenomenon?


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Comments

Tony Hirst 11 Dec 2007 at 10:04 am PST
I'm looking forward to seeing TV sports tie-ins using the re:play pattern ( http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010121.html ), in which the state of the game at which the player starts is a duplicate of the state of the game in the real world (such as the state of the table in a snooker sim, or the course, pin and ball position in a golf sim).

The ability to use game data as the basis for saved films (cf. Halo 3) will also open up all sorts of opportunities for digital puppetry and machinima production.
Andre Thomas 12 Dec 2007 at 2:51 am PST
Interesting article. But anyhow I think games in the style of Lord of Vermilion(Square Enix arcade game) and Eye of Judgment have the potential of being the next big thing in way of casual-friendly games, however its going to really take strong marketing for such a thing to happen.






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