Silicon Knights visionary Denis Dyack has criticized social gaming as found on networks like Facebook, accusing the medium of harming traditional games and predicting that the whole concept is going to crash harder thanToo Human.
“It is damaging traditional gaming for sure but … how it’s going to work out is anyone’s guess,” said Dyack. “The trend that I see is it’s probably going to be one of the biggest bubbles and explosions that our industry’s seen in a long time and I think when it crashes it’s going to crash very hard. I don’t think there’s an economy there.”
“I don’t know about Zynga — I think that’s a big micro, but I think that the amount of venture that’s being poured in, in general, that’s most of the video game industry investment. As far as I know right now, it’s going into pure social gaming. It looks like marketing to me. It doesn’t look like real gaming. And maybe it’ll change, I don’t know. It looks very, very dangerous.”
Dyack believes that a lot of the benefit of social gaming is “imaginary” with developers radiating “Pie in the sky ideas.” According to the developer, when the time comes to show some actual revenue, a lot of these companies embracing social games will come up short.
