This news.com article is calling 2008 the Year of Gaming. Usually I write these sorts of things off, but gaming has inched ever forward in consumer consciousness, and 2008 may be the year where it really explodes.
The interesting thing is that its consoles doing what PCs thought they could do seven or eight years ago: become the home's digital media hub. Turns out PCs are too vulnerable to viruses, and just too hard to configure, for the average joe to bother with, when they have a TV and a DVD player that runs like a watch. The naivete of the WebTV era becomes very apparent in hindsight: when TVs had terrible resolution and there was no real broadband for the masses, the last thing you want to try to deliver is The Internet in the living room.
Much better, with HDTV and broadband, to utilize a platform that has its own intrinsic value (gaming and movie playback) to then serve as the platform for whatever you want: video streaming, web surfing, chat rooms, Folding@home, whatever people seem to be attracted towards. The investment in any one thing doesn't have to be big, because the platform is not make-or-break on these new features. The easy to set up, easy to run game console has horsepower and sophistication to spare, and these other things are not very difficult added value propositions.
Add the media attention on games like GTA4, and the Blu-Ray capabilities of the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there (PS3), and you do have a confluence of circumstance that could indeed propel games much higher into the consumer world than they are already.
