Re: The Future and past of audio games
One challenge is that gaming technology is changing at such a rapid pace—and gaming standards with it. I actually think VR, and the accompanying advances in head-tracking and 3D audio, presents some really incredible opportunities for accessible gaming. The problem is that the investment needed to get into VR development is pretty substantial. For any indie dev, it's tough to make that investment work when you don't know what the returns on your investment will be; even more so for dev who are developing for a much smaller market, such as blind gamers. The tough thing is that you could start working on a VR project today, and four years from now when you're ready to release it, who knows where the market will be?
One thing I think we haven't considered when asking about the future of audio games is that, someday, it may converge with the mainstream market. I know that seems like an impossible dream to most of us—but there are people in the game industry working tirelessly to make it happen. Their goal would be to see increasing attention to accessibility in gamesacross the board, perhaps to the point that someday we don't have to talk about audio games versus mainstream games—we just talk about games. It sounds crazy, and it's probably a long way off, but there is really a lot of momentum building in that direction. Consider Microsoft's implementation of a speech API for Xbox developers, EA's recent fixes for the visually impaired, and so on. I've spoken to people in the industry who have commented about design meetings where they're starting to ask questions like, "How can we make this item easy to find without sight?" So I really do hope that the future of audio games will simply be games—games that everybody can play.
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