Future of Gaming

Future of Gaming is bright. We’ve got new technology flooding in and, a few years from there might be a revolution in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Metaverse, there is some much to anticipate about.

Video games have garnered immense amount of popularity in the past two decades. And the pandemic made gaming an even more popular source of entertainment amongst people. According to reports, Gaming is now a bigger industry than movies and sports combined.

Revenue for gaming grew 12 percent in 2020, up to $139.9 billion from $120.1 billion in 2019, according to a report by market research firm SuperData. And at one point last year, four out of every five people in the United States had played a video game within the previous six months.

“It used to be ‘what to watch’ and now it’s ‘whether to watch,’” venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote. “And the answer is increasingly ‘no, I’m going to play a game.’”

So what’s next? Gaming from hereon is only going to grow and become even bigger. How? Check below:

Virtual Reality (VR)

For years, virtual reality has been one of the most intriguing and fascinating concepts, especially when it comes to gaming. But the technology has not been live up to the imagination gamers have had.

Polygon’s Ben Kuchera put it bluntly last year: “VR has been five minutes away from some kind of breakthrough for about eight years.”

VR is still a niche category and supports only a particular kind of games.

“Right now we’re sort of in this trough of disillusionment about VR,” Kevin Mack, a VR game developer, told Built In in 2020. “There was a lot of hype around it in 2015 and 2016, and then the whole world sort of got butt-hurt that their first-generation VR headset didn’t instantly morph into the Holodeck.”

Well, VR still has a long way to g and might have some significant improvements and massive companies like Facebook, Valve and Sony are busy trying to advance the industry, investing considerable resources to develop VR hardware and games.

VR has its fair share of problems that need work.

“VR is a solitary experience. It’s a thing that you’re doing on your own and it’s a thing that you choose to do to the exclusion of anything else,” Mack said. He enjoys playing VR games, but if someone else is around, he thinks twice before strapping the headset on.

“I still generally wouldn’t really wear one that much at home if my girlfriend is there too,” he said. “Because I feel like I was completely cutting myself off from the social environment.”

Though he recognizes the limitations, Mack remains optimistic about VR’s future.

“VR, I think, will remain niche, but it could potentially turn into a big niche,” he said. “I think we’re going to see some very impressive stuff and very compelling stuff come down the pipe in the next couple of years.”

Mitu Khandaker, a professor at New York University’s Game Center, is hopeful about VR’s role in gaming, she said in a 2020 interview with Built In. Khandaker just doesn’t think it’s going to look like people alone in their homes playing through a headset, so much as a co-located experience that multiple people share in.

“I think that the future of VR is more through social VR,” she said.

There are huge hopes with VR technology. You never know, we might not have to wear those huge bulky glasses, and just change the screen mode to VR and, see everything around us. Or if that is too much, we could at least have a small pair of glasses to enable us indulge into virtual reality, just how 3D glasses work.

Augmented Reality (AR)

Back in 2016, Pokemon Go became an extremely popular game among folks.

It was a perfect example of the possibilities of Augmented Reality.

The game, which has since generated over $5 billion in sales, was most people’s first brush with AR and remains the technology’s biggest success story.

The good thing about AR is that it connects you to the artificial reality and sometimes bring the artificial reality into real world but never disconnects you from the real world, which for some people gives it an edge over VR.

So far, AR gaming has gained the most traction on mobile phones. But tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Snap and Magic Leap think the future of AR will take place through specially made glasses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The idea of artificial intelligence has been expressed in gaming for decades — most prominently in non-player characters, like the colorful ghosts in Pac-Man or the innocent bystanders in Grand Theft Auto.

The fact of the matter is that AI already exists in video games. It has certainly gained more prominence and has become significant more than ever. AAA titles like Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, The Last of Us and No Man’s Sky have set a bar for Artificial Intelligence and also give us an idea that how far can we go with AI and where we have reached so far.

AI isn’t just part of the gameplay experience though. It’s part of the game-making experience. For several years now, designers have been using AI to help them generate game assets, which frees them up from painstakingly drawing each individual tree in a forest or rock formation in a canyon. Instead, designers can offload that work to computers by using a technique called procedural content generation, which has become fairly standard practice in the industry.

“It would be hard to find a commercially released game that does not ‘phone home’ to the developer with information on how it’s being played,” Togelius wrote.

The AI uses a particular algorithm based on the style of gamers gameplay. However, there could be a possibility where the AI may not need a specific algorithm to follow.

Cloud Gaming (CG)

The future of gaming might take place on someone else’s computer. That is to say, in the cloud.

Cloud gaming offers users the ability to play video games streamed from tech companies’ faraway servers, in the same way they stream Netflix movies on their laptops without needing to pop in a DVD first.

In theory, this arrangement makes the gamer’s local hardware less relevant — they can stream the games regardless of their device.

This may not be a very popular form of gaming but it definitely can not be taken out of equation when it comes to Future of Gaming.

But the biggest hurdle cloud gaming needs to clear in order to become truly mainstream is to be able to offer a smooth, non-laggy gaming experience for users. And that sort of experience is hard to come by for anyone without a great WiFi connection.

Not only that, running a cloud gaming service is costly and computationally intensive. So getting the technology right will take time.

In 2019, Xbox head Phil Spencer told GameSpot as much: “I think this is years away from being a mainstream way people play. And I mean years, like years and years.”

High-Fidelity Graphics (HFG)

In the pursuit of ultra-realistic graphics, video games have come a long way. Video games have way more realistic than they two decades ago.

Major graphic designing companies like Nvidia and AMD are on a mission to create enhancement in graphics technology for high-fidelity gaming and techniques like ray tracing.

In the past, things like shadows and reflections and lens flares were essentially painted onto objects within the game. This gave the illusion that light was coming from the sun or moon and reacting as it would when it hit a surface. With ray tracing, an algorithm basically allows it to actually do just that.

The technology is expected to be a game changer. The graphics in games look even more realistic, at least in the next-generation consoles likes PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Future of Gaming does count for high-end gaming graphics. That day isn’t far when game characters would look exactly like real human beings. Cherry on the top would be when these graphics would be coupled with Virtual or Augmented Reality.

Metaverse (MV)

A concept popularized by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction book Snow Crash, the metaverse is best understood as an online cyberspace, a parallel virtual realm where everyone can log in and live out their (second) lives. Ideally, the metaverse will combine both virtual and augmented reality, have its own functioning economy and allow complete interoperability.

The metaverse, like the internet, will be used for more than just gaming. It may incorporate office work as well.

But gaming itself is expanding its definition. It’s no longer about competition — but connection. It’s what Keith Stuart describes as a “digital third place,” more closely resembling a skate park than an arena.

Could there be a possibility of humans being a part of the game?