In a Gamasutra feature article called "The Year In Review: Game Biz Analysts On The Worst Happenings Of 2010" analysts from various firms sound off about the worst moments in the game biz during 2010. Below is a small sampling of what analysts had to say.
According to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, the worst thing to happen in the industry in the year is video games going before the Supreme Court:
"What I thought was interesting was there were nine people you could get into a room and not one of them has ever played a video game. You have to be a gamer to know that Postal 2 is not the poster child for all video games. Most people don't know that."
That is an interesting point and the general feeling of most gamers. Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets sees trouble with the iPad ahead:
"The worst thing?," he said. "Maybe also the iPad, since the traditional game publishers might not get their ‘fair share' of the market on new connected devices, and price points for games are also a lot lower."
Finally, Jesse Divnich of EEDAR thinks third-party development consolidation is the worst thing that has happened this year:
"One of the biggest disappointments for myself was seeing all this third-party consolidation," he says. "What publishers are doing is bringing stuff internal. That's why we're seeing so much news on third-party developer closures as publishers become less reliant on them.
What we're going to see is a lot of third-party publishers are going to contract work out to these third-party developers, but it will be smaller work. We used to have a third-party developer community that was working on AA games, but now they're being forced to work on mobile and smaller titles – and because of that we're seeing a lot of downsizing and studio closures."
There are more comments from analysts in the rest of the article, which you can check out in its entirety here.
