The tablet market is booming, and is expected to overtake sales of personal computers within the next few years, and that opens up a host of possibilities for one industry in particular: the gaming industry.
Thus far, tablet games have largely been simple ports of smartphone/iOS games that fail to take advantage of the improved gaming capabilities of the tablet hardware. Many believe those days are now at an end, and a new era of tablets as a true mobile gaming console are about to begin.
"The tablet will become the quasi-console, quasi-controller of this generation," declared Atul Bagga, senior equity research analyst for Lazard Capital Markets, during a panel at GamesBeat 2012 last week.
"Developing for tablets is a relatively simple solution to the discovery problem," added Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "There are simply fewer games."
And that discovery problem seems to be a key point that may convince more and more developers to make tablet exclusive games in the hopes of reaching a burgeoning and untapped market.
At a separate panel at GamesBeat, developers expressed the growing difficulty of marketing their iOS games in an overly saturated market, and that the costs for acquiring new users was going through the roof, to the point that only large developers could realistically market their games to guarantee success (at least in terms of sales).
"The pressure on prices will shoot upward and not slow down until more ad inventory comes online," said Gabe Leydon, Machine Zone CEO. "There's billionaires in the market who want to win. They are willing to spend $7 a download. This is going to be a long, tough fight."
It appears some of those deep pocketed behemoths are already taking note of the potential in the tablet gaming space though, with Microsoft announcing that Halo 4 would run on their upcoming Windows 8 Surface tablets. Amazon meanwhile just launched a social gaming platform for their Kindle Fire tablet called Amazon Gamecircle, and Android tablets just got a new gaming service called GameTanium, which functions similar to Netflix.
It appears the tablet gaming scene is about to take off, and it's an exciting time for gamers looking for a new source of quality games, and an added use for their tablet of choice.
