Peter Molyneux: We're about to witness the Facebook of gaming
The God of the Gods dictates the future
"Ten years in the future pretty much everyone who has a mobile phone will be interacting with some sort of gaming experience all the time. That may sound ridiculous but we've all got Facebook accounts and a huge number of us use twitter every day. And if I said ten years ago that every aspect of your life you're going to volunteer and put online and show off to countless strangers. Your latest birthday party. You'd have called me crazy."
Probably. "Then you've got all the interconnectability," he says. "There are going to be so many discoveries in the world of gaming and outside gaming of what actually happens psychologically when you connect people together. As delightful as Twitter is at the moment, I think with in gaming there could be some brilliant experiences."
"So in ten years' time there's going to be these amazing franchises that are going to be worldwide obsessions."
Touch me
Which brings us to touch itself. You'd be hard pressed to find many gaming enthusiasts that would choose a classic controller over an iPad screen, but according to Molyneux this is a generation gap that's about to close - and we think he might be right.
"A lot of the games that were really successful on controller were successful because they were built for controllers," he says. "And I think the same is true of touch. A lot of the successful things on touch are going to be successful because they're built from the ground up for touch.
"Imagine we had a touch world and we didn't have controllers, and I said to you, 'Right, I've invented this thing called a controller. It's got a thumbstick one side, four buttons the other side. Thats going to cause a revolution in gaming.' You'd probably think 'Well that's ridiculous, it must be so limiting to do that'."
"It's only in the last five years that we've really squeezed all the goodness out of controllers.
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"It's only now that we're realising that it's not just about precision, it's about feel. It's about how it feels to tap a cube, or how it feels to put down a little troop in Clash of Clans….It sounds a bit zen to say it's all about how it feels, but it really is."
And as Molyneux quite rightly points out, a lot of consumers dealing with touch "are dealing with games for the very first time". This is the only way they've ever known how to play.
"I think there's a long way to go with touch," he adds. I think we're going to play some games in the next two, three, four years that are just going to totally blow us away. There's already talk about haptic light touch. So your finger can feel the screen as well as touch the screen, which I find very exciting."
"So you'll pull your finger over something and it will feel like fur or pull your finger over something and it will feel smooth. I think in ten years the resolution of touch will get more and more. There are still very low resolution touch devices. I think the touch we've got now will be looked back on in ten years' time and we'll say 'I can't believe we ever used those devices'."
- Want more gaming? Then check out the best free Android games out at the moment.
Hugh Langley is the ex-News Editor of TechRadar. He had written for many magazines and websites including Business Insider, The Telegraph, IGN, Gizmodo, Entrepreneur Magazine, WIRED (UK), TrustedReviews, Business Insider Australia, Business Insider India, Business Insider Singapore, Wareable, The Ambient and more.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider covering Google and Alphabet, and has the unfortunate distinction of accidentally linking the TechRadar homepage to a rival publication.