Over the years, computer games have been mainly the development of graphics striving for idealized photorealism. Today, the industry is focused on completely different technologies that enhance the comfort of virtual entertainment.
For a long time, technology development in computer games was based almost exclusively on graphics and physics models. When the first “Crysis” was released in 2007, considered to be the game with the most realistic graphics to date, many gamers were stunned by the hardware requirements of the title and had to hastily upgrade their computers. Today, the need for photorealistic graphics is still strong, but in the meantime many other technologies have begun to rapidly develop and take over the attention of fans. Below, you’ll find the top four trends that are changing the gaming industry.
This technology is a complete contradiction of the story associated with “Crysis” and spending mountains of money by gamers on hardware upgrades. The game runs on an external supercomputer that does all the computing and displays the game’s graphics, which are then transmitted to the viewer in the form of video and audio. The player controls a controller and sends feedback to a server, which sends back further changes to the screen. The key to this technology is the extremely fast internet, which will allow for instantaneous data exchange between the user and the supercomputer. Cloud gaming is a chance for the industry to make games incomparably more accessible to the casual gamer than they were before. Imagine a service similar to Netfix where you select a game from a list and immediately launch it in your browser – that’s how cloud gaming should work. More and more large companies are investing in this form of service, although the technology hasn’t quite matured yet. If even giants like Google with its Google Stadia can’t get over the technical issues, gamers still have to wait a bit longer
The remedy for cloud problems could be the 5G internet, which is entering the market with great strides. Compared to 4G LTE, the dominant cellular technology today, the reduction in transmission latency is more than tenfold (from 33-44 ms to 1-3 ms), and the increase in data rates is about eightyfold (roughly from 250 Mbit/s to a maximum of 20 Gbit/s). Such a leap will allow not only to optimize the performance of games in the cloud, but also increase the comfort of experiencing online games, the quality of streams, or the speed of downloading updates and entire titles. Downloading “Doom” of 2016, using LTE network, the player has to wait almost 5 and a half minutes – with 5G it would take 4 seconds.
The video game development scene is dominated by AAA developers and smaller commercial companies. Such a model may begin to fade over time thanks to the emergence of increasingly easy-to-use tools for developing and publishing games. In the past, many independent developers have shown that the indie scene can have a huge impact on the growth of the industry. Many of today’s most popular titles started out as humble modding projects, and a perfect example here would be DOTA, a fan-made map modification for the commercial Warcraft III, which over time has become a separate gaming genre and the foundation for some of the most popular games in the world – DOTA 2 and League of Legends. Greater access to easy-to-use tools and knowledge bases, as well as a growing community, suggest that indie games will stir the industry ever more boldly.
The technology that combined these two concepts has been in use for some time. Games in the NBA 2K series allow users to import their selfie and create their own likeness based on it. To make the virtual basketball player look like a player, you obviously need the right photo quality, good lighting and so on, but the tool serves its purpose and is readily used. Another issue is the lending of their face to virtual characters by celebrities. An increasing number of famous actors and cultural figures are appearing in computer games. Due to its popularity, the medium becomes important to the mass audience, and for the actor it is a chance for good marketing. In “Death Stranding,” most of the characters key to the plot are scanned movie stars, and “Cyberpunk 2077” boasts actor Keanu Reeves as one of the supporting characters.
