By Roland Landers
The online gaming industry is one of the largest spheres due to the ongoing evolutions in technologies which have fundamentally transformed how we play games. Through this series of continuous changes, game production has undergone a radical transformation, prompting companies to adopt newer technologies to make gaming more distinctive and more exclusive than it has ever been in its history.
In today’s date, Asia has the largest video gaming market in the world, with about 1.48 billion players, followed by Europe with over 715 million gamers. According to estimates, a whopping 3.24 billion players played video games globally in this year of 2022.
The pandemic changed the way we work and how different industries function. Most office workers were now at home and enjoyed the experience away from their cubicles and had more time to themselves due to a flexible work schedule. A lot of this free time could be accounted towards the success and boom in mobile gaming. It established a positive feedback loop for game content creators, more content meant more playing hours and therefore a need for further development of new content.
Game development is a complex process but it involves four main phases: concept, pre-production, production, and post-production. One of the most important game development choices is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process.
Game developers try to produce games that are different from any other game in the market by introducing new perspectives, new gameplays, genre combinations, enhanced graphics, or new characters.
Therefore, almost all games must offer novel experiences along with great quality to be able to retain their players and succeed commercially. Consequently, it has become mandatory for the software game industry to try to morph and adapt to the preferences and demands of its players.
Likewise, research while developing a game is essential since a game that is not usable or playable for gamers, will likely not be played very much, much less enjoyed by gamers. As a consequence, the sales of a game will most likely be affected by its lack of usability and enjoyment.
There’s so much for game development studios to consider if they want to produce their next hit game. The best games we see explode in popularity and seem to somehow not only adhere to basic game design principles but also subvert them at the same time. Now more than ever there is a market for games specialising in offering their users experimental experiences. AR/VR games which were written off for being too technologically ambitious now have the hardware and software capabilities to be created.
If you had to ask a group of gamers what their main gripe is about their hobby, many would blame sky-rocketing GPU prices as their main problem. This is a problem that could most easily be checked with a combination of cloud gaming and stable 5G internet. According to most game creators using the cloud for development eliminates the need for costly hardware. And with remote work booming, cloud-based development offers a way for teams to work together globally as teams can upload and access files from anywhere. It’s no wonder then that 60% of game creators said that they develop games on the cloud; an additional 18% say they use a hybrid model of cloud and on-premise.
Simply put, cloud-based gaming refers to gaming as a service or on-demand gaming, in which the cloud service streams content to personal devices, granting game participants access. It eliminates downloading and installing games on a computer or mobile device. Mobile gaming is another trend in the gaming industry that will continue to expand in the upcoming years due to the increasing number of smartphone users worldwide.
Remember, it is the people who play video games that contribute to a particular game’s success or failure.
The author is the CEO of All India Gaming Federation