The gaming world is evolving at an increasingly high speed. Developers come up with new ideas almost every week. The gaming industry is already immensely large (Beattie, 2021) and will grow even more. The question is, where can we find the gaming in about ten years? What will the future of gaming give us? This is a though question to answer but there are indications that will tell us in which direction the gaming industry will flow.
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The traditional gaming companies are being threatened by tech companies that all want a slice of the big, gaming industry pie. The tech industry is looking for ways to make video streaming as natural as streaming on Spotify or Netflix (Beattie, 2021). There are already numerous examples of this evolution like Facebook starting their own gaming platform and Google launching a cloud gaming service (Beattie, 2021).
Beyond the upcoming competitiveness in the gaming industry, there are also a lot of technical innovations like for example virtual reality. There was already a hype about virtual reality a few years ago but this innovation has not lived up to its expectations yet. However, there are rumors that VR will be one of the most transformative tech trends of the coming years with ramifications to education and training (Marr, 2020). Another trend in the gaming industry is about the social side of gaming. People tend to look for social activities and don’t want to play alone anymore. A development that does look at the social side of gaming is Augmented Reality. AR ensures that people interact in reality with each other. The future of gaming is not only in a virtual reality room, but it lies surprisingly in complementing the reality (Miller et al., 2019).
We can conclude that there are many things possible in the upcoming years for the gaming industry. Which direction it will go remains a secret or now but there will be drastically changes in the near future.
Sam Beekman
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/053115/how-video-game-industry-changing.asp
[3] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216290
I also think big tech companies like Microsoft will in time step away from the physical xbox and move to a virtual version of the platform, as cloud computing gains ground. This will cause a further shift from hardware to software, as we’ve already seen in the last decade, and open up the gaming industry to even more people, as some of the ‘expensive’ physical products will be phased out and more scalable options like cloud gaming take over.