Where will gaming be in 5 years? 10 years?

[DinnerX]

I think sony will be the one to go out of business. The ps2 had dvds and the ps3 had bluray and HD capabilities helping their sales. I don't see anything new coming out for a ps4 to ride on. The incredibly hostile and stupid moves sony has been making recently aren't going to help either.

The lack of a big name exclusive may hurt them too. Many nintendo characters are well known and lots of people have heard of halo. Sony doesn't have anything close to those in recognition.

[Xeogred]

GOG will be amazing in 5-10 years.

Already better than Steam when it comes to old stuff, way better.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

If I had any clue about how games will turn out in 5 years I'd share it. I don't though. I know one thing, my Sega Genesis will still work.

[Mr.White555]

My predictions in 10 years:

- First Person Shooters become niche
- Nintendo will release an MMORPG
- Flight Simulators will become the main form of competitive gaming
- Controllers will have integrated touch screens to compensate for lack of mouse controls
- Publishers will be consolidated into one or two entities.
- Every system will be 3D compatible but is rarely used

[AppleQueso]

One thing I really don't see happening is 100 percent download-only. At best, portables might go that route, but home consoles and whatnot? I doubt it.

Why? No other media has gone 100 percent digital. Even in PC games and music you can still get physical copies of pretty much every major release.

The day another media goes 100 percent digital is the day I start worrying about video games doing it.

[jfrost]

GOG will be amazing in 5-10 years.

Already better than Steam when it comes to old stuff, way better.

I imagine they trying to make RAGE work on newer PCs ten years from now.

Devs couldn't even make the current version work with current computers! It will take GOG some wizardry!

[christopher85]

There will be an absence of variety from games to systems, I'm sure.

[flojocabron]

In five to ten years the videogame industry will cater to the third world countries over us in the first world. We all have a firm grasp over what a videogame should be, but for people who barely know what a game is they have the most potential.

With the advent of the 35 dollar tablet now in india, and soon to be other countries download games will be an interesting market over there! How will word of mouth spread over in a country of over a billion people? The downloadable content will be very important. Even if the cost of something to be downloaded were to be a couple of cents, multiply that by a billion! Game companies will make lots of cash!

Not just games but other things in that vein. Controlling all that will be a massive task in itself! Leaderboards, accomplishments and prizes will truely be special.

Gaming companies will have to manage transactions and keep cheaters at bay!

Top games can still be viable for years to come. And even the most banal game will still be downloaded a million times!

[J T]

Cloud gaming will catch on and allow you to game from a variety of devices with a standardized controller, so you can transition seamlessly from your TV, to your handheld device, to your computer, and back again. You’ll save all your game info in the cloud and play and pause from the cloud, so you never have to stop.

Competitive gaming will continue to grow in popularity. Gamers will begin to see sponsorship and e-sports will make their way to regular television broadcasts. Jackpots will become huge (as we’ve already seen with DOTA2) and the top game developers in the business will be brought in to create the ultimate in balanced competitive games which will be funded in part by the sponsors.

Minecraft clones will become a well established genre. Minecraft 1.0 will finally be released after the genre’s popularity has peaked.

More MMO games will feature in-game economies that can make you money by selling rare drops. As companies take cuts and find ways to create artificial supply-demand cycles in their games, people will become increasingly addicted to games in hopes of making big money and video game online worlds will become criticized for becoming an abstract form of a casino.

Art games will form a solid niche, but will no longer be called ‘games’ because that title is too limiting. Instead the ‘interactive arts’ will become a hotbed for new ways to elicit emotions and create meaningful experiences via the use of technology that has its roots in videogames, but in their more abstract forms will barely show any similarity to videogames as we currently know them. A divide will be made between interactive art, interactive cinema, and interactive entertainment that intellectuals will debate for years to come.

With the increasing sophistication of A.I. (which we have begun to see in Façade and the Jeopardy robot), non-playable characters in videogames will be chatbot personalities instead of scripted characters. This will allow for increased role playing abilities in open world RPGs. It will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between MMO humans and NPCs.

People will still be wondering when Valve is going to release Half Life 2: Episode 3.

[Xeogred]

I absolutely hate the idea of cloud gaming, saves, and whatnot.