The first good news in the next few months The great return of ultra-high-budget video games After two years in between, it’s finally getting ready to set its sales charts on fire. The pandemic has left its mark, but by now everyone has learned to work in this new normal, and Covid or not, in the fall software houses will no longer be subject to the forced restructuring of recent years. Finally, bypass that limit that keeps the gaming industry in a kind of stagnation, slowing and disturbing production cycles. Many of these games will sell millions of copies, but each in its own way, above all, will be a kind of test for the entire market.
From a certain angle, we’re back in the years that predicted the arrival of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, when the entire supply chain was questioned, or rather, given up on death, by those who saw smartphones as the only possible future. . Recall that the great and well-deserved success of the PlayStation 4 was necessary to give new impetus to the specialty consoles industry. Today, doubts no longer focus on custom hardware, as in 2012, but on the software to justify the purchase, in short, precisely this huge clay-footed Triple A. And let’s be clear, doubters no longer focus solely on custom hardware as their fate is already written, but we’ll talk more about that later.
Is there room for us?
The so-called Triple A must still prove that they have an important creative role, or they will soon have to change format to survive. We’ve been repeating this for a while, the difference is that after the massive slowdown in new releases, many players have learned to live their passions even without them, discovering a product world with clear production values, much more interesting and more. The funny ones are often associated with movie graphic artists. Big publishers’ games are now very similar, but the production costs are too high; on the other hand, we can find projects like Stardew Valley that have reached twenty million copies sold this year, or projects with the latest Diablo Immortal grossing a million dollars a day.
The flavors in the expansion
People are rediscovering strategic and managerial, in addition to all these genres abandoned by electronic entertainment giants, it has been said that they are not very profitable and now come to the fore precisely because of this desire for new experiences, or at least because they differ from the usual third-person. action with light role-playing components. The appetizer with Stray is officially over: welcome (or should we say welcome back?) In an era where indie games beat head-to-head with the big guns.
In a similar context, smaller, bold and agile publishers are growing and evolving, notably Devolver Digital and others. Annapurna. For some, this isn’t a huge novelty, but in this case the context is the general public, not always informed enthusiasts.
Pandemics and wars
Now let’s go back to consoles, also consider what was expected a few paragraphs above. In this context, the situation certainly remains unstable, given that a deficit in the number of manufactured chips that seems to be improving anyway, now adds to the potential threat posed by instability between China and Taiwan. Right now, news comes that Apple is shifting a significant portion of its manufacturing power to Vietnam just to anticipate potential future problems. In short, also It’s going to be pretty hard to walk into a store this winter with a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. in hands. And that’s a problem involving Nintendo as well: The Switch is getting old, the winning concept and audience are still keeping it afloat, but sooner or later Nintendo will have to open a new chapter in its history and it’s a new, more modern console. But they have no intention of having the same supply problems in Kyoto as Sony and Microsoft, because they may not make it out alive.
1:1 scale console
Nintendo’s business is consoles in line with their unique products, Sony and even Microsoft can count on the diversity of assets that allow them to incur losses and face unexpected events more confidently. Also, returning to what we talked about just a few paragraphs above, The fate of dedicated hardware is now sealed. The experience offered by a console will soon be perfect or nearly replicable in the cloud, streaming, and providing a versatility previously unimaginable. If you find it difficult to feel how much the gaming world has changed in the last three years, just take a look at what has happened in the last three hundred and sixty-five days. Two events first of all: Samsung has launched its TV app dedicated to gaming, compatible with almost all cloud systems and all tablets, and Sony has launched its “Game Pass” with more and more pressure on PC. Today it’s possible to play Spiderman on the Steam Deck, tomorrow you can play Starfield on a TV with nothing but a remote: Did you imagine that last summer?
The future is already here
What will happen here in the coming months is a slow but relentless normalization of events and services that are still seen today as exceptional stories by fans or just a whim for a quick test. without a real station or money to play hits from day one. But then there is only one moment when the exception becomes the rule: it always happens when comfort kicks in or there is an extraordinary event that hastens the transition between the past and the future. With a good connection, which not everyone has but less and less, you can have Forza Horizon 5 running in the blink of an eye and save over a hundred hard drives. At least it won’t be 4K yet, but nowhere is it written that you can’t compromise for a few games or a particular game. There are those who played The Witcher 3 on Nintendo Switch, let’s never forget that, and sometimes it’s the same naivete who finished it on PlayStation 4… that compromises. Give users the ease of use of Netflix, the same span and make sure they will use any service you offer them.
three sisters
The video game year about to begin for the three sisters isn’t looking bad: they’re definitely not going to struggle to fill the calendar boxes between heavyweights, remakes, remakes, and side projects. It is behind the scenes that the situation is much more complicated than it seems. As mentioned earlier, Nintendo finds itself at a very sensitive moment: with the need to refresh its hardware in a context that isn’t quite right. Sony will have to continue doing what it did last year: filling the service gap with the competition isn’t easy when you suffer this much lag and have to act fast. Besides, this will be the winter of the new PlayStation virtual reality, an unannounced success and one with several and formidable challenges ahead to conclusively convince its potential audience. Instead, Microsoft must prove once and for all that it knows how to lead development teams, no less than who are constantly struggling to get into that fictitious regime that promises miracles. Also, Microsoft is currently facing the closing of the Activision deal at a stage that some observers have described as critical. In short, there is no shortage of headaches.
GPU for everyone!
This will finally be the autumn of GPUs! And that’s good news because the more consoles evolve into services, the more the PC will confirm it’s an irreplaceable gaming machine; the only thing that will lose most of its founding and fundamental aspects from the move to the cloud, for example, the development and use of mods.
The world of video games moves fast, moving even when it seems static, so it’s a lot of fun to observe and comment on. Regardless, it will always be fun to be behind this great circus, even if he seems to have stopped believing in himself today. It’s true that the video game industry is a shadow of what it’s become now, but there are thousands of people hunched over the keyboard right now, inventing the games of tomorrow. And as long as they are there, we will be there.
Source: Multiplayer
