Predictions and the Future of Gaming

[DieGrootHammer]

Times, they are changing. It's inevitable in every industry, and as we are mostly a gaming focused community, let us discuss our predictions of what will happen in gaming in the near future.

I have the following 4 predictions to make:

1. Change in gaming business models

Like it or not, the gaming industry has some of the most interesting business and revenue models of any industry. Stemming from an systemic problem with cashflow, game developers and publishing houses had to become much more greedy creative with generating revenue from games. With micro-transactions and paid DLC, it's been fascinating viewing and analysis the changes from a purely business perspective. I would say get used to these models, because things won't change, and will only change in the future

With rising development costs and decreasing project deadline windows, game developers will be pushed to their limits to reach their lofty goals they set out when creating games. I predict that this will cause many developers to adopt a more episodic way of selling games. They will carve up games into smaller parts, and release these pieces over a period of 6 months or so. This will give them enough time to polish and shine each piece of the game, making games much better running and optimized. And with 4-5 different episodes of a game coming out, it's a much more stable cash flow that gets generated from one title for pretty much the same development time and resources. Hitman is already doing that, and Final Fantasy 7's remake will follow suit. If these games are successful, be ready to see many more games follow this model

2. VR and the impact on games

VR will have a great impact on the world of gaming. It will give players much better immersion in games, and VR will become the must-have tech for the next 5 years or so. As development of the tech matures and prices drops, adoption will rise and more people will have access to the tech.

But VR games will be difficult to develop for. Not specifically from a technical aspect, but more from a gameplay perspective. VR works exceptionally well for games where the player is much more fixed, enabling more movement of the head and looking around. Movement will not the the selling point of VR. My prediction is that a genre of sorts will be created, where more games are made with a fixed player perspective. Imagine a mech-warrior type game for VR where you are seated in the cockpit of a mech, able to look around the cockpit of the mech, ala Elite Dangerous. That is what I mean, and VR will see plenty of those type of games come onto the scene.

3. Modular Console development

The fact is that the current console generation just isn't powerful enough to keep up with PC, and the divide will only grow larger. Consoles of the future will see a more modular design, enabling Sony and Microsoft to upgrade the consoles, extending it's lifespan and generating more income for these companies. Google already is working on a phone that works on this principle, so it's not hard to imagine that consoles of the future will follow suit.

4. Online clustered processing and streaming

With internet speeds increasing, and more and more people get connected, games will rely much more on online elements. From streaming games from a system to another, to full blown server processing of games, online services will become even bigger parts of games in the future. Many games currently are playing with the idea of rendering some aspects of games on servers and purely streaming the info onto our machines. This practice will grow and become the corner stone of many games. I believe that it will ensure highly complex games will be able to run on hardware that may not be able to process that locally. Even peer-to-peer processing will be a thing within the foreseeable future I believe


So, what's your predictions for the future of gaming?

[Grievous]

3. Modular Console development

I personally don't see this happening. One of the key things for a console is, everyone knows when they purchase one, every game made for the console will work relatively well, until the end of it's lifespan. As soon as you make it modular, you going to get instances where some games don't work because you haven't upgraded. I play both, it doesn't bother me all that much that it's less powerful than my PC.

[DieGrootHammer]

I personally don't see this happening. One of the key things for a console is, everyone knows when they purchase one, every game made for the console will work relatively well, until the end of it's lifespan. As soon as you make it modular, you going to get instances where some games don't work because you haven't upgraded. I play both, it doesn't bother me all that much that it's less powerful than my PC.

Fair point. Look, I also don't mind playing on a less powerful machine. But looking at the rumours for the next Nintendo console, it seems that a form of modular design is something that is thought about for future consoles. Apparently the Nintendo NX will be able to be daisy chained together with other NX consoles to increase it's processing power. This will not necessary complicate the development process too much by fragmenting the hardware too much. In the end it's the same hardware, there's just more of it to work with. It's a revolutionary idea IMO, and something that Microsoft and Sony will definitely be looking at for future consoles. Maybe they won't have full modular design, but some aspects I predict will be upgradable by either the same concept as the NX, or some other form of modulation. In the end, Sony and Microsoft will be the custodians of the console's hardware, so they will ensure that there isn't that many fragments out in the wild to complicate development further.

[Grievous]

Apparently the Nintendo NX will be able to be daisy chained together with other NX consoles to increase it's processing power. T.

Pretty sure you could do that with the ps3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

[DieGrootHammer]

Pretty sure you could do that with the ps3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Well then...TIL...I didn't know that. I always thought people hacked the console to connect it to each other.

[Grievous]

Well then...TIL...I didn't know that. I always thought people hacked the console to connect it to each other.

I remember it being one of the things sony was bragging about before release. "You will be able to make a super computer with a bunch of Ps3". The US airforce actually had a cluster of over 1500.