Reuters to social, mobile gamers: 2011 will be better

Oh, the possibilities
Aside from the burgeoning and indisputably successful social and mobile games markets, video game sales suffered a year long slump in 2010. Industry professionals predict that game sales for this year will total four percent lower than 2009. But if a recent Reuters report is any indication, 2011 will be the year of the mobile and social, bringing revenue growth to the industry. And of course, that means more money to make even better social games, which Mark Skaggs, vice president of product development at Zynga, says will have "deeper gameplay, more polish, and be much more and better social experiences."

Carnegie Mellon professor and game developer Jesse Schell predicts that 2011 will ring in games that exist on all platforms from the PC to our phones and to our consoles and TVs, Reuters reports. The news service also predicts that 3D and motion gaming will grow in 2011 thanks to the oncoming Nintendo 3DS, the Xbox Kinect and 3D TVs that will be on display at this year's CES. (Well, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, at least.)

But as for social and mobile gaming, we've already seen signs of this predicted boom in 2010 with marvels like Angry Birds on iPhone and Android along with the recent CityVille explosion on Facebook. So, 2011 could very well mean even more growth for social and mobile, but don't expect leaps and bounds when it comes to cross-platform play. Well, unless companies like Zynga continue to make use of HTML5 and the mobile web--then we're onto something.

Mass Effect for Facebook looks even more likely, job posting suggests

And honestly, with how well Dragon Age Legends (DAL) did (and how impressive of a game it is) when its companion Dragon Age 2 launched this year, why wouldn't it be? Mass Effect is even bigger than Dragon Age--that's enough to convince me, but alas, we have another piece of hard evidence. Inside Social Games reports that Bioware is looking for "a well-rounded Artist to work on an exciting, new, social game for gamers," a job posting reads.

More specifically, the job is based in Bioware San Francisco. You know, the studio that was born of EA2D, the social game arm of Bioware's parent company? The studio that was also wholly responsible for Dragon Age Legends? (Hopefully, this is all coming together now.) While the text does well to avoid pointing out any Bioware franchise in particular, the timing is simply too close to the release of Mass Effect 3.

The console game releases on March 6, 2012, and most social game development cycles range between six and nine months. The job posting calls specifically for an experienced concept and UI artist, meaning this game could be past early planning stages already.

While DAL never cleared the 1 million monthly players most Facebook games strive for, again, Mass Effect has much more mainstream appeal than Dragon Age and could easily blow past 1 million monthly players. We have only one request, Bioware: Please, somehow, make it involve a Reaper?