Like it or not, Dungeon Keeper is the future of LCD gaming

There has been a lot of fuss about the new ‘free-to-play’ Dungeon Keeper on iOS and Android. For much of the gaming community, it’s a new watermark for how the freemium model is ruining their favourite passtime. But like it or not, we’re going to have to get used to it. You can bet EA is making money from it, it must be cheaper to develop and there’s a lower risk of nobody playing and sharing it with their friends.

Now touchscreens and smartphones have made computing so accessible, normal people are the real audience and the real market. In this YouTube video, the host flippantly mentions that anyone giving the app 5 stars must only have ever played freemium games, before skipping on to more expletives. But let’s pause for a moment. That’s a very real audience. That exists.

In fact, more than that — now that the mainstream is a real audience for games on these devices, this may well become the majority. They aren’t gamers, why would they pay £2.99 up front for a game? Maybe they only even registered their payment card in iTunes so they could buy new levels in Candy Crush. Or perhaps it’s just a legacy from buying singles on the music store years ago.

For better or worse, this is the newest, fastest-growing and most profitable audience in gaming. Think about television. Perhaps 80-90% of TV is absolute dross, made for the Lowest Common Denominator(LCD). But it’s successful and popular, it has its audience. In fact, popularity is the best possible word — it’s what people want in the language that the market rewards.

So we have to get used to this. We have to get used to the idea that as gamers, what we love is now just one part of a bigger landscape. And yes, sometimes it will mean we don’t get a worthy successor to a game like Dungeon Keeper.

But as the same time, we’re now have part of a bigger pie. The gaming industry is almost unrecognisably bigger, more powerful and more attractive of talent than it used to be. We’re seeing some really great and progressive games from both the big studios and the small indie developers. Isn’t that a good thing?

We’re only going to see more, and worse, examples like Dungeon Keeper. The economics just make too much sense. But I don’t buy that it’s directly at the expense of ‘real gamers’ — I think we’re just approaching a more natural equilibrium for the industry as it matures toward a state like TV or cinema. So it’s fine to bitch and complain about these examples but if you can’t balance that against some acceptance of the bigger trends and gracefully diminish into the minority, you’re only going to cause yourself grief.