GAMES/TECH

Download play: making demographic-chasing child’s play

One of the clever things The Sims is able to do in order to guarantee financial success is to theme it’s world around a new demographic with every expansion pack. So people are into metal? Fine, release The Sims: Rockin’ Out. Everyone’s watching – I don’t know – American crime dramas on Sky? Time to develop The Sims: Whodunnit? It’s effortless, and yet it could become even more effortless with new X360 services that, if Allard is to be believed, stream new content directly to the hard drive whilst the game is being played. Sure, we’re not likely to see a Sims on the 360, but something like Tony Hawks could keep up with the kidz by streaming the latest angst-metal to your big white box (for a small fee, I guess), or Epic’s US offices could track a US war film’s journey to UK shores so that army camo skin downloads for Gears of War are published in time to coincide with the hypothetical film’s release. It’d be like releasing lots of cheap expansion packs over short periods of time; perhaps not something people want, but still something that’s feasible.

Hell, it could happen to PC owners as well: just look at Valve’s Steam service: if it weren’t for the downloads being manually activated, they could partake in “chase the demographic” as well. We’d leave Half-Life 2 alone for a few weeks because there’s a new series of 24 on, and by the time we return we’re foiling terrorists and being paranoid about our co-workers. I just see it being a more likely scenario for the console kids. Maybe there’s a future DM feature in this…

qazimod