Times, wrote Bob Dylan, are changing. And that was 1964 – imagine how he would react to NFTs. The game industry saw rapid growth in 2021 and Mark Zuckerberg now wants us all to live in the “Vanilla Sky” he created. They try to sell drawings of monkeys online for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s next?
Surely you can shoot tons of enemies and level up again – that’s pretty fundamental. But trends are also emerging that will give the games industry a new face in 2022. That’s them.
Single player
Numerous new single-player titles were announced at the Game Awards 2021. “Alan Wake 2” will be a survival horror experience, as will “Slitterhead” by “Silent Hill” creator Keiichiro Toyama. Quantic Dream will develop a “Star Wars” game and “Hellblade” will have a sequel. The most anticipated game of 2022 is likely Bethesda’s solo game Starfield, another space opera.
Solo games: Exaggerated death rumors
It’s been a few years since EA rang the death knell about linear single player games and closed Visceral over it. However, it turns out that the same market that loves “Fortnite” has plenty of room for dozens of high quality solo game experiences.
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Superhero
NFTs
It is no longer a DLC helmet, says Ubisoft. It’s a handcrafted NFT (Non-Fungible Token)! It’s a unique digital collectible that looks and works just like the cosmetic DLC you’ve been buying in games for years. But look – a serial number. That means it’s – oh, probably thousands of anything – worth it. You can swap it with other enthusiasts of handcrafted “Ghost Recon” helmets, or just wear it in-game and impress everyone who can get close enough to see the serial number.
Do you remember? The community reacted with the same rejection to the first wave of microtransaction DLCs with horse armor and Co. But that has not stopped the industry from making practice the standard. NFT scams could end up in far more games in 2022 than gamers would like.
Casual games
Traditional gaming revenues (sales of PC and console titles and spending on microtransactions in these titles) account for around a third of the spending of users in the gaming industry in most countries. The rest, about 60 percent, come from app-based social and casual games. Basically, those of us who have a gamepad or mouse and keyboard in hand are dinosaurs. If you can’t interact with the game by simply swiping a touchscreen, it’s a boomer shooter. The future is an endless horizon of cartoon farms controlled from phone screens around the world, where NFTs are kind of growing on every piece of land.
Subscription models
Netflix for games. The gaming industry’s mythical golden goose for at least five years. A subscription pass that gives access to a large library of games instead of having gamers pay for each one. There were a few hurdles in the way of the widespread introduction of this concept: Firstly, most gamers have already invested more in their Steam libraries than in their retirement provisions, and secondly, the major publishers were far too busy pushing their way into the digital shop window of Steam than that they would have considered working together to create such a library.
Best games for Game Pass 2021
Recently, however, Microsoft has made this work. Game Pass now has around 18 million subscribers and offers a growing number of blockbuster games for PC and Xbox Series X | S on day one. Kind of Netflix for games. Meanwhile, Nvidia GeForce Now is offering a subscription with the added incentive of running games on high-end RTX 3080 graphics cards in the graphics giant’s data centers and streaming them to any device with impressive fidelity and latency. Now it’s like Netflix, but for games.
The cloud
Speaking of GeForce Now, it really is a good argument to get rid of the desktop PC and stream games straight to a TV. Good luck with your access to a 3080 graphics card in 2022. Thank the crypto farmers who are hogging all devices and driving prices to absurd heights to be part of the modern gold rush.
Like some other trends that are supposed to get going in 2022, this one has been announced for years, but it finally seems to have the technical basis and the size of the target group to assert itself. This is not bad news for PC fans: a larger audience of gamers who play on PCs with maximum settings (albeit in data centers) means a greater incentive for developers to push the visual limits further.
Remakes and remasters are definitely not getting any fewer as there is more material every year.
Remasters and Remakes
This modest pastime has now reached a level of maturity that enables the older catalog to be updated, preserved, redesigned from scratch and reinvented. Playing with childhood memories is a dangerous game, but as studios like Nightdive (the developer behind the formidable remaster of “Quake”) show, you can do a lot with a light touch.
In 2022 there will be a remaster of “Kingpin” and, somewhat confusingly, one of “Life is Strange”. “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”, “Blade Runner”, “Gothic”, “Knights of the Old Republic”, “Dead Space”, “Splinter Cell” and even “The Stanley Parable” all face one more or less major facelift. This practice is becoming more common and the list of potential candidates is growing every year. In case that already annoys you – you will unfortunately have to get used to it.
Blockchain
It’s safe to say that this will go beyond the gaming industry, but nonetheless, blockchain – or decentralized banking as it is worryingly called in some circles – is already a growing force in gaming. For example, “F1 Delta Time”, with the official F1 branding of Formula One Management, allows you to link your account to your crypto wallet and earn Ethereum through in-game activities. It was a long way from horse armor to here.