What is the future of Video Games?

[Melooon]

I'd like to have a chat about Video Games, and the future of them! Partly because its something that's often on my mind, but also because I really think there is change afoot and its worth noting.

I was always someone who was quick to get setup with the newest things, if there was a console to buy I'd usually get it within the first year, and I tried to maintain a top-spec PC for games too. I had most Nintendo and PlayStation consoles, plus even a XBox 360 for a while.

That started to change in 2020, the PS5 was the first generation of PlayStation I did not buy and have no to plan to buy. The games had become heavy and same-y, and there were no longer cool exclusives like Little Big Planet that made it interesting. I did buy a newer gaming laptop in 2022 and a SteamDeck in 2023; however the last big modern game I tried to play was Indiana Jones (2024), and it ran for about 40 minutes on that gaming laptop before informing me I did not have enough video ram and it promptly crashed.

In a few months GTA6 will come out, and regardless of you enjoying GTA games or not; it will prob be the biggest game launch in history. It's been in development for over 10 years, and we all expect it to be the largest and most advanced game ever produced.. and, I know I won't be playing it. I am priced out of the market on games today, I cannot afford any games console or PC capable of playing GTA6, and even if I could, I don't think I'd deem it worth it. 

From where I'm sitting, it seems like the ballooning complexity, size and cost of games has become totally unsustainable, its at its logical end and something different has to come after.

I suppose there are a few paths that future could take;

• We could end up in a world of eternal emulation, playing the same retro games from now on (that was mostly what I got the SteamDeck for and what it's good at).
• Indie games are always an option, but frankly there is an overwhelming choice of indie games and its very hard to filter out ones that are very simple from ones that feel fresh and compelling.
• We could end up in a world where there are only 5 big games and all that happens is they get reskins every few years (the Fifa-death of the games industry)
• We could see what I would really hope for, a balanced and sustainable world of small studios producing semi-polished but smaller games more like those made in the 2000s; however time has already proven this is economically unlikely.

I personally have two objectives: I want to see a proper return to web games, online spaces, and a merger between the web and online worlds. I think every website can be a virtual world and I want to see indie games being less like standalone products mimicking the past of games, and more like flowing connected spaces that share information and assets the way the web does. Secondly I want better ways to filter and explore indie games, I'd like to see good games journalism and magazines focused on indie games, and I'd like to see games that are about exploring other games.

I'm curious to hear peoples own views; are you still on the new-game bandwagon? Is it still worth it for you? Do you think everything is actually ok and I'm just a grump? Where do you think things will end up in the new few years, and more importantly what can we (as individuals) do to make game games world what we want it to be? 

[fairyrune]

it's a complicated subject and i'm far from qualified to talk about it at length. but what i do want to consider is that... hardware keeps getting more and more expensive as it's eaten up for AI data centres at rapid pace, and that means triple A games are becoming less accessible. what does that mean for games companies? their audience becomes smaller. they lose their customers.

it's my hope that in that case, something comes to plug the gap. double A makes a serious comeback? we've already seen the success of titles like expedition 33. indie games, too, could fill the niche, although you make a good point about the good ones being difficult to discover on the internet today. it's going to be rough, though. developers also need that hardware to... well, develop.

i don't think you're being a grump at all - you're just recognising the way late stage capitalism is strangling the life out of the industry. i wish it weren't an "industry" at all, though. i wish that flash was still alive! web games were what i grew up on when our family had a PC that couldn't even run the most basic of 2d games. i thrived on sites like notdoppler and friv... these things made gaming accessible for so many people. all you needed was a computer that could access the internet and use a browser with flash.

as for myself... i never followed the latest game releases as i wasn't able to purchase them and frankly, so many of them didn't interest me and they don't interest me now. most of the games i play are indie games or, like, a 24 year old mmo that was built for the ps2, so...

what can we do about all this? there's actually a lot of things. but i would urge people to learn how to repair their own tech, and to fight for our right to repair what we own. no single thing will solve this issue, but our little actions will add up.

[Watanabe_1994]

I don't know genre or styles will come out of the future, but I know distribution wise that it will be both digital and licence based (As seen by the habits of company's like Sony, Nintendo and Ubisoft. Valve has been doing this since 2003 with steam.)

Also physical distribution of videogames will die out in the console market by the end of the decade (as seen with GTA6 and the Terraria 15th Anniversary).

I highly Doubt that independent developers will have the time and money like in the past to press there own disks and mass burn them, even on the PC market since the average gun/ball gamer on there has a prebuilt that doesn't even have a disk drive. Vary grim times indeed. 

[Hutch3G]

I think that, with the death of physical media from Sony and Xbox, and the absurd console prices above 600 dollars at worst, they will lose the majority of customers, they will slowly have zero shelf space in stores, which also equals less sales, and if they do release a new gen console, which honestly feels too soon, they're just throwing everything away, as I think the current gen consoles have been heavily underexplored and underwhelming, especially after the 8th generation of consoles is still somehow supported to this day, noone will want to move to a new platform (which will likely cost thousands anyway). I also think we reached a peak in graphical capabilities, I'm not sure what they can do more, technology has stabilized to common standards and there's not much else needed to improve on.

The moment they will not have any more physical games in store, it'll be pretty funny that nintendo will have a "monopoly" over the physical market. I did not like their greedy choices for switch 2, but somehow the competitors shooting themselves in the foot make them the least bad of them.
And let's not talk about steam machine or steam deck, which go for ludicrous prices and really noone can afford. Gaming has become a hobby for the elite class and rich reviewers, and if that's gonna be their only audience, their loss. The numbers will speak for themselves.

It's unfortunate kids will just keep on gaming on mobile phones with free mobile games like they have the past decade, but at the end its up to us to keep the good games around. There are thousands of old games waiting to be explored, to be played, many we don't know about. I don't want to buy any more console, my old systems have so much to offer that I feel satisfied already. Plus it feels like a whim to to just keep releasing new consoles in such a short timespan.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I mostly dropped out of the commercial gaming many years ago. I felt that the need to cash in the cost of the more and more gigantic productions suffocated the creativity of the medium (imho, Hollywood movies had a similar development, but the medium is older and there are more alternatives).

Yet I don't expect that the medium will disappear. I suppose that it will develop more into the direction of streaming, although that sector had some punch backs in the past; but video games are too big of a market to drop. I also expect that the market of casual phone games will continue to grow, and we can expect to see the development of more elaborate games for phones, as phones have replaced the PC for a big amount of users already.

The indie and the retro sector are niches, and they will continue to exist - but they are mainly frequented by a handful of idealists and enthusiasts - in the 21th century, both the reach and attraction of a medium are heavily dependent of marketing campaigns. Really small productions are basically invisible - most of the popular "indie games" are rather big, commercially productions for quite some time now. We can't hope for a mass appeal, but I hope that some people who have some enthusiasm for small video game productions might form communities in the long run - the retro gaming sector managed to do so after all.