In what ways will computer and videogames change in the next 10 years? It is a question that tech-obsessed gamers often ask each other (often after a few pints on a Friday night), when we consider just how far we have come since the early days of the Spectrum and the C64 in the 1980s.
The last ten years have been gaming's golden decade. The next-gen consoles fulfilled their early promises. And then some. And we were treated to some truly classic gaming moments, as we recently documented in TechRadar's top 12 games of the noughties.
But the games industry is nothing if not forward-looking. It doesn't tend to do nostalgia. And with a flurry of new gaming technologies on the near-future horizon we want to know what the industry experts – the developers, the publishers, the hardware makers - think that gaming in 2020 is going to be like.
As such, we asked them to extrapolate from current developments across a range of emerging gaming tech including motion and voice control; MMOs and online gaming; 3D and new display technologies; cloud gaming and more. We wanted both wild speculation and measured opinion. And we got it.
2020: the generational tipping point
Rob Cooper, Managing Director of Ubisoft, thinks that we will have reached that all-important 'generational tipping point' by 2020, when "it's likely more people will have played games than have not," which in turn, "means that it will become much more part of the establishment like TV and film.
"This broadens the potential audience and makes it more culturally acceptable to be 'a gamer', particularly by key thought leaders in the mainstream media," the Ubisoft MD adds, also noting that games are beginning to pervade education and, "in the future, it's likely that kids and adults alike will learn about science, climate change and so on through game simulations to recreate or explain these scenarios."
On a more whimsical note, by 2020 (as one analyst joked) might Google, PopCap, Linden Labs and Blizzard join forces to produce the ultimate mirrorworld MMOG? "Which goes on to become a nation in itself, whose citizens are paid entirely in virtual currency, and remain a real-world economic force via their pivotal roles as part of the global information cloud, overseen by the Blizzgoocaplabs Corporation?"
Quite.
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
unregistered00
January 31st
4. My prediction for the decade in the gaming industry will be even better graphics; more hardware sales to play those games; more mergers; an increase in steam games; more lawsuits against piracy; and a further stagnation of fresh ideas on its already stagnant think-tank.
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romi
January 30th
3. What the world needs is Wii functionality with PS4 graphics....now wii are talking a beast of a product!
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pete_l
January 29th
2. 3D real-time textures, indistinguishable from reality. So when you look at the "game" you won't see any difference from if you were looking at something in the real world. Couple this with 3D webcams (coming, surely) it will be possible to merge a real-life webcam view with something in the game. Like having your street depicted / integrated into the scene.
Also, game markup language. Instead of loading the game and executing it, the game makers will be able to download the "script" for a game to your PCs gaming/AI/physics engine. I would guess the script for a game would include shorthands for building types, vistas, characters etc.
Put these two together and TV or movies become entirely different. Instead of having real people playing characters in a drama, the drama's script will be broadcast (more likely: sold/distributed) for viewers to play and interact with themselves. Shakespear's "all the world's a stage" will become "all the world's a game"
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tonymontana
January 29th
1. If you asked where gaming would be in 2010 before the DS and Wii were released people would mention photo realistic graphics and ray tracing.
It's ironic because the DS and Wii both had a huge internet backlash which still persists and were pegged to be failures.
Then again the iPhone got the same treatment and World of Warcraft did as well...
The future of gaming isn't easy to predict but online features pretty heavily in any future from the looks of it.
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