Video games seem to have no limits: they come in a mind-blowing variety of genres, starting with everyone’s favorite shooters, adventures, RPGs, strategies, wargames, and sandbox hits and casinos like JokaRoom Vip. Let us not forget casual entertaining titles: probably, everyone reading this article has Angry Birds, Sudoku, Solitaire, or maybe even some casino games like Blackjack or online pokies installed on their smartphones for killing commute time or excruciating minutes of waiting in a line to a dentist. Even though everyone understands that the gaming industry is, first of all, a business meant to make its founders richer (from the annual total value of about $198 billion in 2021 to the estimated $339 billion in 5 years), players also accept the fact that quality entertainment has to be paid for. That’s why they eagerly pay for some extras of popular video games and play casino games not only for free but also for real money. And yet, in spite of obviously successful financial results, more and more hardcore gamers have been noticing signs of stagnation in the industry. People have been talking about how games feel and look more and more alike, and there are no new ideas on the horizon at all…
We have found thoughtful insight and detailed analytics covering the ways the gaming industry is going to change and grow in the near future and would like to share them with you in this article.
Just like everything in the history of humankind develops gradually and consistently following the same pattern:
…the gaming industry can not avoid moments of ups and downs. Plus, there are always some key turning points, after which the pattern visibly changes. For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire marked the beginning of the Middle Ages, and World War I ended the Victorian era and the long 19th century.
The same can be transferred to video game history, according to the professional gambler we mentioned earlier. Here is what he says.
(By the way, he warns that the dates he has chosen are only a conditional distinction and are sometimes used for convenient systematization and perception of the information.)
1993
The first turning point might have been in 1993 – 1994. It was the time when Nintendo absolutely dominated the video game market, but more and more corporations wanted a piece of the pie in that fast-growing industry. So, in the early nineties, many new companies entered the market. Nowadays, we are used to having only three main brands, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, but in the 90-s, the picture was quite different. By 1996, the market already had Atari Jaguar, Panasonic 3DO, Sega Saturn, PC-FX, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. The competition between them was life-or-death. And these are not just words: by the end of the 90s, most of those game developers either went bankrupt or left the market.
When there are so many players in one business sector (and especially the one that has just started growing), each company tries to stand out and release the most unusual product while the variety of offers grows.
That was the time of the first experiments with VR and different controllers. The games themselves were also changing dramatically and quickly. Whereas before they were perceived as entertainment for kids and nerds, this perception started to change. Game producers began developing video games for a more adult audience. In 1993, the great and terrible DOOM came out — with blood, demons, and a heavy metal soundtrack. The very next year releases with brutality, eroticism, and philosophical overtones poured out: Super Metroid, System Shock, Final Fantasy VI, and the first installment of The Elder Scrolls. All these games came out in the same year; and they differed greatly from the usual platformers and side-scrolling shooters of the time. In the years that followed, the number of adult and ‘serious’ games grew. So, we could call this period the ‘Age of Adulthood’.
1997 – early 2000s
1998 was one of the best years in the history of the gaming industry. Even though no technological breakthrough happened at that time, the fact remains: only in 1998 alone the number of games that later on were added to various ‘TOP 10 OF ALL TIMES’ lists was higher than ever. Here are the titles: StarCraft, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2, Half-Life, and the slightly late to the party Silent Hill, which came out in January 1999.
By this point, most developers had already gotten the hang of 3D and managed to make them look much less like a tool for visual tortures. Graphics were evolving like never before and after. Just compare the first Half-Life and Crysis: they only have a 1-year difference, but they seem like they are from different decades.
There was a tangible shift in themes as well. Topics of love and death, self-determination and life choices, politics, and satire on real life began to appear in games.
Together with the 2000s, a huge number of completely different games arrived. Shooters, Strategies, RPGs, Horror, and racing simulators: the era was generous to the diversity of genres. This decade was rich in changes, so let’s call it the ‘Age of Experimentation’.
And keeping up with the spirit of the era, the beginning of the 2000-s became a takeoff runway for mobile gaming. Video games played on mobile phones, tablets, and other handheld devices soon after the release of portable gaming consoles like the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) and the Nintendo DS.
At first, mobile games were simple adaptations of existing console and PC games. However, they quickly evolved to take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices. And with the release of powerful new smartphones and tablets, mobile gaming is only getting more popular — we have been witnessing how puzzles, strategy, multiplayer games, iOS and Android mobile casinos available for free play and real money gambling have been filling up our smartphones and tablets up until now.
2007
If any year can compete with 1998 for the title of the best in the history of the gaming industry, it’s 2007. Mass Effect, Assassin Creed, Crysis, BioShock, Modern Warfare, and Uncharted were the engines of that time.
Throughout the 2000s, the game industry grew and strengthened, attracting more and more followers and investors. Those, in turn, wanted to expand their potential audience, which led to the fossilization of many franchises. With the idea that both a housewife and a person who had never held a game controller must be able to master video games and fall in love with them, some companies decided to simplify the rules and lower the threshold of entry. Sometimes this could be done without any harm to the gameplay, but not always.
Video games began to look more like movies. The focus began to be on the story and staged cutscenes. The technology of motion capture quickly spread, and many games attracted professional actors.
The flagship of the trend was, undoubtedly, the Uncharted series: it successfully used the action-adventure genre. Uncharted borrowed many tropes from movies like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, and Armor of God. Another successful example is the Mass Effect trilogy. Many believed that the industry had never come as close to the level of Hollywood blockbusters as it did in the Captain Shepard story. We could call this time period the ‘Blockbuster Era’, as almost all of the major franchises tried to resemble the box office hits of that time.
There have always been exceptions. And our ‘Blockbuster Era’ is not an exception to this rule. In the early 2010-s, it was the Souls series that began to gain popularity even though it had almost no plot and no explanations, and instead, offered the players obscenely high complexity.
2015
As we are getting closer to today, another shift in the industry worth mentioning was surely 2015.
Wither 3, Bloodborn, Fallout 4, Metal Gear Solid V, Dying Light, Arkham Knight — what do all these games have in common (besides the fact that they were all released in 2015)? Their gameplays are all based on the open world paradigm. Yes, this genre had appeared before, but it was 2015 when it really started thriving. So much so that until now, when we have half of the major releases with an open-world at its core.
In addition, 2015 was a very important year for the indie scene. That’s when Ori and the Blind Forest and Undertale came out. And again, there had been many cool independent projects released before them, but they hadn’t still been popular with a wide audience. Ori and the Blind Forest and Undertale won numerous prestigious awards and thus brought indie into the mainstream. So after 2015, the number of indies has multiplied: if it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t be seeing so many great games from small private studios now.
The same year Pillars Of Eternity appeared, which is not really indie de jure, but most of its development came from a crowdfunding company. And thus, another new trend began. The developers realized that people are not just willing to buy games but also to pay for games that don’t yet exist; all sorts of kickstarter fundraisers and early-access game releases poured in.
2022
You may ask, why 2022? Why will this year be a watershed for the industry?
First, a number of major releases were scheduled for this year. And they are not just the usual AAA titles but extremely long-awaited projects such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Starfield, and in 2022, we will get Breath of the Wild and a sequel to God of War. All in all, 2022 is going to be a hot year for releases, the kind of hot years that herald the beginnings of new eras.
Second, it’s Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was released at the very end of 2020 and was probably the most anticipated game of those years. We had high hopes for it; we thought it would be the first next-gen game and set a new benchmark for the other developers. However, it turned out to be a typical sandbox title, with a faceless protagonist, one-type quests, colored loot, and towers. Negative feedback followed, which shows that players are tired of similar open worlds and soon might simply stop buying them.
Recently another important event happened. Valve announced the release of its own handheld console — the Steam Deck. And this will not be Valve’s first gaming system only. It is also the first serious competition for Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo in years.
On top of that, it seems like new flagships of a new era have been coming up, and they have less resemblance to the typical games of the same genre released in the past couple of years. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is still more shooter than open-world, God of War, in general, is linear, well, and to realize a full open world in space would be impossible…
Anyways, we can only speculate and guess, or we can wait for a little while and see what this new era will bring. What there is no doubt about is that it is not going to be boring.