Despite the massive disruption created by the global lockdown, the global gaming industry is still growing. Millions of people worldwide play video games daily, and the rapidly expanding vibrancy has set the stage for many exciting innovations and tech trends.
As different tech innovations continue marching forward, they’re changing the way brands, advertisers, and marketers take advantage of the enhanced engagement across multiple platforms. Here’s a look at tech trends and innovations helping shape the future of the gaming world.
Cloud gaming
Cloud gaming is among the latest developments in the gaming market. The technology allows users to enjoy different games without installing the game software or executing frequent updates. You also don’t need a gaming console when playing games with cloud gaming.
By making high-end games accessible through your browser, this technology has solved a problem that previously affected millions of players. You’ll only need a fast internet connection to play the games. As such, cloud gaming has attracted the attention of leading companies like Microsoft and Google, with many joining the bandwagon at an impressive rate.
Esports
While video games started as a popular pastime, players can now play multiplayer games competitively. Esports offers a realistic tournament environment for spectators and professional players, with game developers incorporating high-tech elements to make the experience more engaging. These high-tech innovations include live matches, live spectators and others.
Today, esports I among the biggest gaming segments, with expected revenue growth of a billion in 2022. Market experts also predict the global esports market will be worth over $3.5 billion by 2025. Esports is also on another level in incorporating gaming technology to attract more audiences.
By the beginning of 2020, esports had about 272 million casual live viewers and 223 million enthusiasts, bringing the audience size close to half a billion. That represented 11.7% year-to-year growth, with market experts predicting there will be over 295 million enthusiasts and 351 million casual viewers by 2023, bringing the total viewership to over 645 million.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain
Starting from the gambling market, cryptocurrencies are taking the world by storm. This popular technology trend is highly prevalent in the casino industry as it powers hundreds of best bitcoin casinos in 2022. You can check the anonymous online gambling sites if you’re looking to wager anonymously online.
Besides facilitating anonymous gambling, blockchain technology is making in-game purchases easier. With cryptocurrency, players no longer need third-party payment providers to facilitate fiat transactions. Instead, you can purchase game collectibles instantaneously.
Blockchain also provides secure environments for gaming brands and game developers by using highly effective data encryption protocols to secure their information. Additionally, it enables interoperable player profiles, which allows players to use their unique public address for different games.
Face Recognition
Face recognition is frequently used in security systems, and now it’s becoming prevalent in the gaming industry. Today, players can enjoy video games with characters that mimic their appearance, made possible by 3D scanning and face recognition. That makes the games more engaging for players.
Face recognition in gaming has a huge potential, and companies like Intel are starting to take note of this. Intel is offering developers its high-tech RealSense 3D Camera that scans 78 different points to read player emotions from a person’s face.
With all the latest developments in face recognition, the gaming industry is entering a new dawn. For instance, Tencent is already using face recognition to limit the number of time youths spend playing video games and maneuver around China’s restrictions.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality has undoubtedly transformed the gaming industry, allowing users to enjoy games in real-time. The VR technology gives users a glimpse of the dream world in the comfort of your home, with breathtaking 3D effects and top-notch accessories.
Before virtual reality became popular with gaming, the technology was popular with doctors and the military. Today, VR technology has become popular in the video games market, with prominent titles like Minecraft embracing it.
According to research, the virtual reality market size in the gaming sector was worth about $11.56 billion in 2019. Market experts also project the VR industry will grow at a 30.2% CAGR from 2020 to 2027.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a booming new frontier that’s highly influencing how3 games are developed and played. AI games are increasingly shifting the game experience control to the players, whose behaviors help create the game experience.
Almost all games use artificial intelligence to deliver an immersive gaming experience. The goal of artificial intelligence in gaming is to immerse the player in the gameplay by delivering characters with lifelike qualities even when the game is set in a fantasy world.
Until now, artificial intelligence in video games has been confined to two main areas, finite state machines and pathfinding. Pathfinding involves programming that controls the movements of an AI-based NPC.
Pathfinding is essential in all types of games, ranging from classic 8-bit games to open-world RPGs. Of course, no developer wants a villager in the towns they’re working on to start walking through walls or behave unrealistically.
On the other hand, Finite state machines allow artificial intelligence to change behaviors based on specific conditions. These two concepts might sound rudimentary, but they govern most of the artificial intelligence programming in video games today.
Big Data
While big data is a comparatively new concept in the video gaming industry, gathering and processing massive amounts of data goes back ages. Big data is becoming disruptive in the gaming industry, as the massive amounts of data collected from players daily help game developers develop immersive features that personalize the gaming experience.
The data generated from video games come from various sources. For example, Electronic Arts hosts about 50 billion gameplay minutes from 2.5 billion game sessions monthly. This example will help you understand the depth of big data that can be leveraged in video games. This video game data is evident in different forms like these scenarios:
- In-game voice messages and chats are saved and analyzed for complaints against the video game through sentiment analysis.
- Glitches during a game that got reported by the players and logged into the log files. By recreating these scenarios, video game developers can work on ways to fix these issues.
- In-game interaction among players can be tracked and used to deliver a more realistic experience online. The process requires developers to analyze thousands or millions of interactions.
Big data also enhances the customer experience as players don’t need to choose their desired settings each time they decide to play a quick game session. The rise of real-time monitoring of player data coincides with game streaming and a growing number of video games that require the internet to load their features.
Conclusion
With all the above tech trends and innovations emerging in the video game market, the future of monetization and engagement looks bright. The video game market is heading in a direction where the gaming experiences will be more participatory, immersive and streamlined. There’s no telling how groundbreaking these technologies will be in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see how they transform the gaming market.
