The Dark Cloud of Gaming

Recent reports have shown that over recent years, one of the main trends we're seeing in the streaming music economy is that songs have been getting shorter. People are writing songs differently. In the past, you would be paid if you sold an album, but with the streaming economy, more songs can be streamed at a time, so albums are being packed with shorter songs. Why? Because now payment occurs for every song listened to, rather than for an entire album. What incentive is there for a songwriter to write longer songs, if it means less frequent payments? As a result, the average song length has dipped by 30 seconds. Translate that to the game industry, and we will be seeing shorter games and lower quality overall. Developers and publishers have much less incentive to put effort into their products because they'll be paid if their game is played even a little. Investing years of effort and money into massive games with impressive quality may soon be a thing of the past, because for much less time and money, a shorter, simpler game can feed this generation of attention-deficient gamers that quickly lose interest and move on to the next shiny new product. Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually finished a 60-hour game from a major game publisher? Quick fixes from mobile app-type games may become the future landscape of gaming in the cloud.