The video game industry has witnessed steady growth ever since the first game (Pong) was launched. Starting from the early 2D to 3D games followed by primitive first-person shooting games to real-like graphic-intense battlefield games, the industry has experienced a lot in terms of technological progression.
As the industry is earning millions of dollars every year, gaming is poised to be the top entertainment means of the century. With innovative titles like PUBG, Pokémon Go, Diamond Reels Casino, and Fortnite rolling out, gamers must wonder what exactly the future of online gaming has in store for them. If you are a gamer, and you are interested in online casino games.
Although it is hard to predict the future, you will certainly witness the following trends in online gaming, based on factors like technology and consumer demands.
1. Increased Focus on Smartphones
The gaming industry in the past few years has witnessed a drastic increase in traffic through mobiles. According to 2018’s statistics, mobile traffic alone covered 51% of the gaming industry in 2018. This will continue to grow in the future, owing to technological progression.
The mobile gaming segment brings the obvious plus, which is mobility, allowing you to play your favorite games anytime and anywhere. Thanks to the prevalence of the Internet, we now have seamless access to subscription-based gaming services for a nominal fee.
2. Virtual Reality
While Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been a hot topic for several years now, it hasn’t been able to make it to mainstream gaming yet. Finally, technology has started picking up some pace, as it is a common belief among developers that VR has huge potential to generate revenue.
While there are several challenges in terms of using VR applications in online gaming, gamers are pretty excited about the thought of playing games in a way that eliminates the gap between fantasy and reality.
3. Social Media Integration
We have already witnessed a trend of games exploiting the improvements in online connectivity in the name of providing dynamic social experiences. Games that require internet connectivity, such as Minecraft and PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) are popular among friends to talk while playing the games in a group. These games emphasize socializing, sharing, and connectivity.
We can only expect future online games to improve the multiplayer feature and offer a better social and gaming experience. These online games provide social sharing feature that allows gamers to capture screenshots or record videos and directly share them with friends on social media.
4. New Payment Modes
Cash as a physical mode of payment has slowly become old school; people these days prefer to pay their bills through one of the digital payment modes, such credit cards, PayPal, Payoneer, and, sometimes, crypto payments. In fact, virtual currencies viz. Ethereum and Bitcoin are slowly becoming a preferred payment mode, especially in the global online gaming industry.
Showing their support to digital payment modes, an increasingly large number of online gaming platforms are offering users with a wide range of payment modes, including newer currency options. Let us all see how this affects the traditional modes of payment in the future.
5. Gamers to Have a Say
Gamers in the digital era expect more than just a cool experience in the gameplay. Most of them would like to be involved in the game development process. They want to create content that is shareable with others in the gaming world. What if they get to contribute to the process of game development to construct user-defined levels that others can also play?
Today, user-generated content (text or video) is continuously on the rise. Gamers can also be given a say in the process to create and deliver something new to the world. In the future, we may get to see gamers joining the developers and later act as their game publishers.
6. Cloud Gaming
Cloud computing is continuously gaining momentum worldwide. Looking at the success, game developing companies around the world have started embracing this idea pretty much that they are working on cloud gaming. The industry of online gaming has witnessed great potential in the cloud gaming project and developers want to capitalize on this opportunity to make games easily available to consumers just like music.
Once cloud gaming is here, gamers will only require a fast and reliable internet connection and they are ready to play their favorite contents. Besides, this will make games affordable as well as easily available to people.
The Future of Online Gaming!
Out of the 3 major segments of online gaming, the mobile segment covered 51% of the total traffic in 2018. We can only expect this share of traffic to grow in the future, as it already has the advantages over the other 2 segments – PC and console gaming.
This turns out to be highly relevant for the casino segment in mobile gaming, as most of the gambling products require a small share of the memory. Also, they don’t seek graphics-intense games to be fully accessible only on wide screens.
As you carry your smartphone almost everywhere you go and play your favorite games anytime you want to, it’s quite obvious that mobile gaming is the future in terms of entertainment and revenue generation. This option also corresponds to the modern lifestyle of us humans, as we do almost everything on the go.
The generation of millennials is taking this trend forward being the biggest consumers of the technology at the moment. The industry can try its level best to cater to this generation and make the adjustments required.
Today, almost all reputable casinos have already secured their presence on their consumers’ mobile phones. Their mobile apps are compatible with a range of devices from different smartphone manufacturers. Needless to say, technology and its various applications, nowadays, are true to the best belief of brands and their customers.
Conclusion!
The industry of online games is ever-evolving. As it offers a huge marketplace for game developers, we can expect to see more trends than ever.