Capcom’s David Reeves thinks that 2012 will be an interesting year. Not apocalyptic per se, more console-tastic.
Capcom COO David Reeves believes that Microsoft and Sony will release new consoles within “two to three years”. Reeves, who was CEO of SCE Europe until April last year, said that Kinect and Move were a shot in the arm for their respective consoles, but that new hardware was much closer than either platform holder was letting on.
“Capcom is definitely going to embrace [motion controls] and just as the first-parties are doing, we see it as another blip before we come into the next cycle,” Reeves said. “3D gaming is the same. Anything they can add to revive and pique interest in the games until we have another clash of the titans in two years time.”
Reeves insisted that his time at Sony hadn’t given him any inside knowledge, but believes that all the console makers are planning for new technology. “All the first-parties have got to be working on something,” he said. “You can be waiting a few extra months to implement something, but you’ve got to set a date to go with a certain chip at a certain point otherwise you’re going to miss the key milestones.”
While he may regard Kinect and Move as a stop-gap, Reeves also thinks that embracing a wider demographic will pay dividends in the future: “If you look at the industry over the past five years and ask yourself where has the money been made, it’s been made on Wii Fit, Brain Training, SingStar, even Guitar Hero … Publishers don’t want to give up their core values but they need to reach out to this wider market.”
New consoles in 2012 aren’t outside the realms of possibility. A 6-7 year gap between hardware releases has been fairly typical over the last few generations, but Microsoft and Sony both seem to be taking a much longer view with this generation. Creating new consoles is an expensive business, and I’m not so sure that either company is particularly eager to jump into the fray again.
Source: Games Industry
