How will online gaming develop in 2018? What are the trends? Our author Schuhmann makes 5 predictions. He sees 2018 as the year of the shitstorm looming.
Predictions are difficult, especially when they concern the future. We have 5 gaming trends in 2018 for you, of which we are quite sure will come true.
Few big games – only gigantic or small
This is a strange trend that has been observed for years and will continue in 2018. While more and more indie games are being released on Steam, the supply in the “medium and large titles” category is drying up: Established studios can only be huge and mega.
The best example of this is RockStar Games. They used to release one or two games every year – since they launched the mega-seller GTA V, no new game has come out – and that was since 2013.
No experiments!
If you will, Grand Theft Auto V has killed 4 or 5 “good, big games,” because there was no space left next to the giant GTA V. Publishers are putting all their eggs in one basket and are reluctant to spread them out across several.
Even EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are experimenting less than before: They prefer to fatten the big franchises rather than try something new.
Especially in online gaming, this is clearly visible: When a studio attempts a game, they immediately reach for the top category with hundreds of employees, developing in 6 countries on 3 continents, getting support from external studios, and bringing the thing to all possible platforms. Anything less is no longer acceptable.
This will be a curse for game series that are not giant successes but only sell a few million copies. When EA realized, “Mass Effect Andromeda is not a blockbuster,” they canceled it and allocated the resources to the two mega-projects Star Wars Battlefront and Anthem.
So either there are giganto-mega-games or indie studios programming something for the PC with limited means. But these “big and medium-sized games” will be rare in 2018 – for the big publishers, only gigantic counts.
Ironically, 2017 was a “medium-sized game,” PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds from Korea, that was a mega-hit – but that is hard to plan.
Studios believe: More is more
If you look at the financial report from Activision Blizzard, one insight has long been acknowledged by the bosses of the companies: More is more.
They say: “Our big franchises compete against the big franchises of our competitors.” And here’s the money to be made: Our mega-title should crush their mega-title.
The giant franchises are becoming increasingly important for companies, as a growing percentage of revenues depend on these mega-titles.
As long as studios think this way, the flagships, the mega-titles, will only get bigger.
One hears from all corners: “The game is now the biggest one we’ve ever worked on.” From Poland, it is said that Cyberpunk 2077 will be even bigger and more expensive than The Witcher 3.
At some point, this trend of gigantomania might hit limits, but certainly not in 2018.
