Editor's Choice

Endless Snow Day

Back to the Cash

They're sitting out there waiting for you to take their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

-Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross

TempleCon benefits from its diversity of players, games and revenue streams. The videogame industry is struggling to follow suit.

The struggle comes from inertia. "These legacy companies that built these legacy platforms, they can't change their business model overnight," says Ferrari. The old model of investing heavily in a game based on what sold well in the '80s and '90s and relying on Generation Nintendo holdovers to revisit the power fantasies of yesteryear continues to dominate.

In contrast, innovations in gameplay and diversity of subject have made non-traditional approaches huge economic winners. "Time and time again," says Cavaretta, "things that turn out to be blockbusters tend to be new, either original IP or new devices." Without the Wii, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the games industry would be floundering. And the iPhone, says Cavaretta, is becoming the biggest distributor of games in the world, adding 165 games a day to its application store. Social networking sites like Facebook have also become platforms for gaming. None of these innovations caters exclusively to the traditional audience of mid-30s, male, largely white, lifetime players of videogames.

The question now is: Can videogames find a TempleCon of their own, a way for a diversity of games to coexist to their mutual benefit? At the moment, it seems it will be traditional games coming in from the cold to snuggle up with non-traditional ones. Eventually, iPhone titles will have to fund the next Gears of War sequel.

Don't get me wrong: Traditional console games will always make money. I suspect that, as with booze and porn, there a few million dudes out there who account for half of all sales of these titles. They will always provide game companies with some revenue.

But someone beyond this core base of gamers is going to have to pay for better graphics, for voice actors, for motion capture, for really bad screenplays. That someone will be non-traditional gamers. The future of the videogame industry may be a kind of massive subsidy program in which players of all ages, genders and races pay for a dizzying array of inspired, innovative games, the revenues from which will supply developers with the capital to make games that suit the tastes of white men in their 30s.

For legacy companies, then, the way to seize the opportunity this economic crisis presents is to convince the newer companies to share their profits, to persuade them of the value in appealing to a core group of gamers. TempleCon is evidence that conversions between disparate games and gameplay styles are not only possible, but also profitable. If this doesn't happen, traditional games may find themselves home on a snow day with no one to play them.

Ray Huling is a freelance journalist living in Boston.