Big publishers forced to innovate through M&A, says Daglow
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Once upon a time, games veteran Don Daglow gazed into his crystal ball and told GamesIndustry.biz what he expected from the next decade in the video games business.
Ten years later (okay, 11, but Daglow's very busy and so are we), we caught up with him to see how accurate his predictions were and what he believes the future holds for the games industry.
Daglow has been involved in games development since the 1970s, working at Intellivision and Electronic Arts before founding his own company Stormfront Studios. He has numerous awards to his name, including an Emmy for technology and engineering on the original 1991 Neverwinter Nights.
As you can imagine, the conversation covered a lot of subjects, so we're going to dive straight into it.
"My crystal ball says big publishers are still an important part of the landscape in ten years. I just think they will function differently than some of the models we see today. My guess, my instinct, is that, first of all, we're going to continue to have big blockbuster games on consoles and various platforms that will come from long term dedicated in-house teams of publishers... The exact structure may metamorphose a little bit."
Daglow says the biggest publishers are even more "intertwined in the spider's nest of the requirements of being a public company" now than they were ten years ago. This means most are focused on growing their revenue every quarter and preventing their stock price from dropping (regardless of whether there are logical and/or uncontrollable factors as to why this is happening).
"That's the problem, because they live and die by that," he says. "The spider web just keeps trapping the
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