The State of Video Gaming in 2025

@ballmatthew

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1 week ago 210

Tech

The State of Video Gaming in 2025

@ballmatthew1 week ago

From 2011 to 2021, video gaming soared. Spending grew at over twice the rate of

Gaming's 2011-2021 growth didnt just beat its historical averages; it significantly outpaced global growth benchmarks (e.g. 3.4x the rate of world real GDP)

Though a few anticipated a slowdown or even a pullback after COVID; most expected that gaming's growth would continue at high rates if not accelerate

Instead, spend fell by ~3.5% in 2022, then barely grew in 2023 & 2024, finishing flat over 3 years and thus short tens of billions in revenue versus forecasts

This decline occurred despite the end of consolelGPU shortages in mid-2022, and in 2023, arguably the best content release slate in the industry's 7O-year history

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A post-pandemic pullback is an insufficient explanation for gaming's contraction

And so not only does the video gaming industry now fall short of global growth benchmarks; its actually shrinking in real terms down roughly 13% since 2021

Its not just spend that is declining players are too. Average playtime has partly recovered, but this is mostly because less engaged players stopped playing entirely

vs. 2021) has led to an unprecedented number of commercial disappointments or flops

Early Access v.1/16/2025

titles, having lost faith in the business cases they had approved only a few years ago

Take-Two says cancelled games weren't 'core franchise' titles

THE PUBLISHER'S RELEASE SLATE HAS DROPPED BY 12 TITLES, FOLLOWING GAME CANCELLATIONS

People Can Fly lays off more than 120 employees as it cuts back on in-development games: 'We need to tailor our plans to our financial capacity'

Paradox cancels life sim Life by CEO says they gave the studio 'a fair shot' but now 'believe it is better to stop' You,

far too long and uncertain" to continue:.

And VC content funding has plummeted, too, falling 77% from H221-H1*22 highs

The collapse in venture investment dollars comes not just from smaller average investment rounds, but also far fewer rounds and from far fewer investors

Many of the independent studios founded since 2019 are now closing because they cant find the VC or publisher funding needed to finish their games

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Jar of Sparks

Earlier today, we notified our team that Jar of Sparks will be halting work on our current title as we search for a new publishing partner who can help our innovative team took bold risks and pushed boundaries; striving to create something truly new and exciting for the industry: We couldn't be prouder of the groundwork we've laid together. bring

Deviation Games Is Shut Down Before It Can Ship a Game

Humanoid Origin

Earlier today; we informed our staff that Humanoid Origin will be shutting down: Despite efforts to shield the studio from broader challenges in the industry; an unexpected shortfall of funding left us unable to sustain operations:

Worlds Untold

4,273 followers

Its hard to find the right words for this, but wanted to share that we've made the very difficult decision to pause operations at Worlds Untold while we search for a new partner to help bring our vision to life. This was not a decision we made lightly ~it's been a deeply personal journey; and we' re all so proud of everything this team has built together.

All Events Orphan Age Events

The Sea is Quiet

Ahoy mateys,

Dropping the nautical jargon for clarity; the last few months we've been going through bankruptcy procedures in France. This started when communication broke down between us and our publisher; leading to payments not continuing. Alas, with our publisher not continuing funding and no other sources effective immediately: (Like at the end of the work today we cannot legally continue working ) day

Employees have been hit hard, suffering back-to-back-to-back record layoffs.

And what gamemakers need is growth. Gaming stocks have underperformed the

And behind the headline layoffs there is still meaningful hiring: Most publishers will have more employees in 2025 than in 2022 even net of acquisitions

GG No industry has a 'right to grow several times faster than global real GDP _ let alone for a decade. Gaming achieved it through several concurrent growth engines

These several growth engines grew the video gaming industry's players + playtime spend, while strengthening network effects and often amplifying one another

Nearly all of the top games of the last 15 years have taken advantage of several growth engines simultaneously: Many pioneered them outright.

Yet the old growth engines are mostly exhausted. There are few high-value mobile

And the many would-be growth engines have to drive real revenue or player growth let alone generate new market leaders yet

With video gaming's growth engines slowing; its less surprising that participation;

Meanwhile; the industry is facing many new challenges challenges have intensified

Gaming's growth is driven by mobiles growth the form factor is over two thirds of new spend since 2011 and is now 55% of the total market; up from 32%

The iPhone led to billions of new players and hours. But after 18 years, growth now relies on population growth and smartphone adoption in (very) low ARPU markets

Social video is devouring mobile-based leisure time: U.S. adults spend 35MM more hours a watching TikTok than in H220/H121 (peak of mobile gaming spend) day

And TikToks growth hasn't cannibalized other social video platforms U.S. adults have grown their use of the category by over 100 million hours a since 2020/21 day

â â â ad revenue fall UA is even costlier install volumes go down more, etc. cycle:

IDFA and social video have led mobile gaming to lose 2.6 percentage points of its

After three years; global mobile gaming spending remains down 8% from their (23% after inflation). The competitive consequences are even greater_ peak

As mobile discovery; downloads; and revenues stagnated, competition ossified. The top 3 titles in the U.S. by genre are 400/ of revenue; titles 2+ years old are 70%

Consider that the biggest new 11 months but also spent $5OOMM on user acquisition (or 36% of net revenue) game

Or that while the number of smartphone owners has tripled since 2014 (1.5B to 4.5B), as has mobile gaming spend ($35B to $105B), there are fewer mobile games

Even Call of Duty is struggling to launch new mobile titles. 2024s Warzone has only 300 of the downloads of 2019s Mobile after 9 months and 5% of the spend

Yet this exemplifies the stickiness of aged titles versus newer; "better" substitutes

from mobile game developers, are facing renewed scrutiny over their commissions and policies year

Take Roblox; the top mobile ever. For every $100 in player spend, Roblox pays app stores $22 (a sum thats nearly all profit for ApplelGoogle) and loses $35 game

Indeed, Apple and Google likely net more in from mobile game sales than all (non-China) mobile and non-mobile publishers and platforms combined profit

2023 App Store Commissions from Mobile Games vs. Operating Income of 25 (Non-China) Video Game Publishers Platforms (2023; Nominal Prices; Adjusted for Impairment Charges and Other Extraordinary Events) Top

Annual ARIVR spend has grown from $0 in 2011 to about $1-2B today; but this sum remains too small (and stagnant) to attract much gamemaker investment

And though ARIVR devices have improved substantially in performance and form factor; sales are down-to-flat (especially after accounting for periodic upgrades)

ARIVR sales are also way behind forecasts. IDC now estimates 6-7MM headsets

Though focused on building a general-purpose computing platforms (vs a gaming

seem to be growing penetration. Gen 8 more than doubled Gen 6s unit sales

And total console content spend is also $18B higher in 2024 than it was in 2011, a roughly 75% increase

Yet all Gen 7+8 growth is Nintendo. Gen 7+8 sales were also boosted by a lengthier cycle (more replacements household growth) and Gen 8 from mid-gen upgrades

And even with more upgrades and replacement total American and European console sales are ~flat versus a decade ago. Only Japan and ROW materially grew buys,

But the entirety of Gen 6-8 console growth in Japan and ROW is Nintendo. And in Japan, both PlayStation and Xbox declined in Gen 8

And Switch mostly benefits Nintendo. Switch users 25-33% fewer games than PSIXbox owners, and over half of sales are Nintendo's games (vs. 10% on PSIXbox) buy

Switchs extraordinary sales are, for the most part; not from net new players but from the cannibalization of two console form factors (livingroom and handheld)

livingroom growth ($18B). Combined console is up a

And while Switch 2 is a likely mega-hit, Gen 9 PlayStation & Xbox sales are both down versus Gen 8 after 49 months now a

PC is a since 2011 and 225% more than combined console; or $30B in total

The PC ecosystem benefits from many compounding advantages over the console ecosystem and its momentum is still growing

Even with the 2021-2024 stall, ConsolelPC spend grew 4.4% annually short of which was powered by billions of new players but still healthy 120,

But Steams consolidation of the PC gamers provides insight into who is driving the category growth. In 2024, Steams APAC MAU exceeds its total MAU in 2017

The largest share of Steam users now use Chinese as their default client language (which probably underrepresents China's total share of Steam users)

Notes: 1 Valve's hardware survey collects data based on the language the user has set their Steam client to, rather than the user's fi rst or preferred language. As such, it's likely that, as an example, many Chinese users choose to use Steam in English, thereby exaggerating English's share; (2) Includes al l registered Sinitic languages and dialects

CCUs affirm APAC?s role in Steam user growth: CCUs when America sleeps and China gets home and bottom when America is off work but China is at work peak

Since 2011, consumer video game spend in China has grown by $39B third of global growth (and 22% of the total market)

But only 20% of Chinas domestic spend goes to imported titles (some of which are banned). Total spend is up 50% since 2017 alone, imported spend is down 5% yet

AAA games from China and for China are now achieving sales figures in China that challenge the worldwide sales of the most acclaimed Western AAA titles

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almost half was outside China; Marvel Rivals is one of the biggest releases in years

Altogether; China's developers have grown their share of non-China content spend a to $19B year

In total, 42% of total worldwide growth since 2011 went to Chinese developers through domestic spend on Chinese title or foreign imports of them

And so total growth for non-Chinese developers since 2011 is less than headlines

And while China is the largest; most mature, and regulated non-Western market,

These non-Western titles thrive partly by focusing on lower device specifications, but also by investing in and prioritizing different cultural events and tones

As foreign markets grow; their domestic production capabilities and supply grow; and this always results in national preferences then shifting to local product too,

GG The films that now top the Chinese box office are not just made in China they are fundamentally of China and for Chinese audiences

Rambo-style action film in which the muscled and jaded Chinese hero rescues Africa from American imperialism and bioterror. The bad guy is played by New York-born Frank Grillo (previously an evil mercenary in Captain America) and is scolded by the hero for America's role in the slave trade. The hero also announces Chinese frailty to be a of the past, while asserting its role as global protector thing

As Nollywood has developed, Nigerian-made films (including those released during COVIDI) toppled former chart toppers like Avengers: Endgame and Avatar

India has always had a strong domestic film industry. As a result, only 3 of the 50 highest-grossing films of all time come from outside Bollywood

more Garenas, Game Sciences, MiHoYos and theyll take share in the West, too

Without many new players ConsolelPC growth relies on pricing = publishers yet

In nearly all media categories; consumers expect (and digest) annual inflation

Packaged prices matter less given DLCIMTXILive Services; which raise the spend

There are a few explanations for video gaming's inability to maintain inflation adjusted prices, let alone grow them and many are unique to the category

Worse, Console PC is experiencing ongoing engagement decreases; even socalled hardcore? gamers are increasingly shifting time to other forms of leisure

The AAIAAA segment's player; playtime; and pricing struggles are surprise. Who

Unfortunately; improvements in game fidelity; scale, and capability have led to a massive increase in the resources required to build such a game

million or more to develop and theres little sign of a slowing of cost growth

Inflation also hit 20+ highs and surged at a pace not seen in 40+ years; leading to unanticipated debt costs and COLAs that have grown budgets another 100+ year

What else has grown far faster than gamers or spend? The supply of games. In 2024, Steam released nearly as many games per month as it did in 2014 overall

In total, industry-wide content development spend has surged 90% since 2017 1.6x the rate of consumer spend growth (and 2x that of ConsolelPCIVR spend)

competition has become more zero-sum than ever and breakevens even rarer

And of course, new releases exist in a market where many of the top games release annual or even quarterly updates

And the top games in a given year? Well, they're almost always the top games in any given year

qualify for Steams full social feature functionality (~S5K in sales in 2024)

In fact; 150 fewer Steam new releases grossed >$100,000 last year than in 2016 spend up 2000

Steam users play only 4 games a year; with games 8+ years old getting 40% of total playtime and Counter-Strike another 130; the 12-19,000 new releases only 12% get

And among the thousands of annual releases fighting for 12% of playtime; #1 gets

30% of playtime for 4 years straight. On PSIXbox (7-31 years), its a stunning 43%!

Excluding annual releases (NBA 2K) but including sequels (Spider-Man 2), only 6.5% of gametime in 2023 was for new games (a share that was high vs. 2021, 2022, 2024)

Tens of billions in development and marketing investment and thousands of

Black Hole Games refers to a phenomenon whereby a massive franchise title has such a hold on players that its nearly impossible for a new game to pull them away

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Hundreds or thousands of dollars in purchased entitlements_ avatars outfits;
âª Fortnite players have probably spent $3OB on cosmetics and items; much of not available in any other game
âª and Epic Games Store
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âª paying $5OOMM to these creators since March 2023

GG Behind Black Hole" games is not just Metcalfe's Law (the value of a network is a quadratic function) but the stronger Reeds Law (it is an exponential function)

As Black Holes" strengthen; supply grows; but players stagnate; even the best

matching; let alone growing; the sales of the prior entry-

But its not easy to convince those who skipped or didnt finish a game to spend a sequel or earn another $70 and 25 hours from those who did

~And building a richer; deeper; and more expansive is a natural response to a market that competes for increasingly scarce players, time, and spend game

To endure; live services titles need to replace a user's existing weekly-to-daily habit which makes a featurelcontent-light launch an even greater challenge

Even at their cultural peak, many would-be GAAS leaders have fewer players than long-running GAAS leaders averaged over four-plus years

And after a hit launch; a new title must sustain against market leaders powered by extraordinarily effective; profitable; and substantial releases and infrastructure

With rising costs of support; shrinking playerbases, and strengthening Black Holes, new live service titles are forced to call it quits earlier than ever

The exhaustion of decade-plus growth drivers that grew players; playtime; and spend. coincided with evolving user behaviors; changing monetization models, and growing lock-in exacerbated long-running competitive and budgetary escalations_ while growth concentrated in foreign markets that shifted to local productions (and then took share abroad)_ and occurred alongside acute macroeconomic financial events and epidemics_ were worsened by microeconomic based competition alongside too many would-be new growth drivers that have to deliver yet

This confluence of factors explains why the market stagnated; not just fell so very short of external and (not publicly available) internal forecasts

And why so many titles have missed internal expectations (or even their production costs)

~And why s0 many gamemakers re-evaluated their development pipelines and, more often than not, cancelled scores of titles to instead refocus on existing hits

Take-Two says cancelled games weren't 'core franchise' titles

THE PUBLISHER'S RELEASE SLATE HAS DROPPED BY 12 TITLES, FOLLOWING GAME CANCELLATIONS

People Can Fly lays off more than 120 employees as it cuts back on in-development games: 'We need to tailor our plans to our financial capacity'

Paradox cancels life sim Life by CEO says they gave the studio 'a fair shot' but now 'believe it is better to stop' You,

far too long and uncertain" to continue:.

~And why venture capitalists retreated back down to 2018 levels, even though worldwide spend is up 34% or $51B

~Why PlayStation; a platform with 1OOMM MAU and $30B in revenue, has seen revenues grow 67% since 2019 but profits fall by 6% (and to a 7% income margin)

~And employees suffered three straight years of record layoffs before counting unreported layoffs and those without specified headcount

pursuing customers on every channel

But how can the video game industry return to growth, rather than just fight over the same players, hours, and spend (and at ever higher costs)?

Without new growth engines, the video gaming market is stuck in a vicious cycle

First, its important to recognize that while low growth is a challenge for everyone especially the largest players new studios and franchises are emerging

Early

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As was the case in China, the global maturation of locallregional content studios is likely to (substantially) accelerate spending growth in those same markets

But with growing national support, far (far) lower production costs; emerging market developers may take most of future growth and more of current spend plus

accelerating benefiting from 14OMM kids turning each of 8, 9, 10, etc., annually

now over 13 and playtime (and growth) is split roughly evenly across all major regions

With 350-400 million monthly active users, Roblox already rivals the size of the entire AAA ecosystem and towers over core competitors

And though children game less than adults, Roblox now has more hours of direct monthly engagement than every gaming-specific console or software platform

In fact, Roblox; with half the users of Netflix and about as many as Disney+ has

payments since 2006

Yet Roblox also loses roughly $35 for every $100 a player spends. After Store and developer payments, only $52 is left for the remaining $87 in costs App

One problem is spend: Roblox generates a fraction of the revenue per hour of rival platforms and publishers (partly due to its sizable pre-teenlteen playerbase)

Another challenge is the platform required for such scale. Roblox now 81.4B annually (or 45% of revenue) just on R&D (13x increase over 5 years) spends

Roblox's engines and data centers now enable surprisingly high-fidelity games (though developers and users seem mostly uninterested in such experiences)

Roblox's R&D also supports numerous (mostly non-gaming) platform efforts. Few platforms ever reach 4OOMM MAU and when they do, opportunities only grow_

Yet Roblox has its own discoverability challenges: The most-played experience is

Moreover; Robloxs benefits while great come with large financial, technological, and strategic implications

Like Roblox; usage and creation of UGC mods has substantially outpaced overall video gaming spend and time all the while enriching gameplay (and publishers)

Unsurprisingly; UGC modding is often hyper-concentrated to top titles a reflection of which genres are suitable and Metcalfes Law (plus publisher policies)

CurseForge has seen its annual mod downloads increase by more than 6x to 24B primarily in support of the best-selling game in history; UGC platform Minecraft

Mod.io; too; has seen its annual mod downloads surge to over half a billion per year with an average of 15MM MAUs by the end of 2024

WeMod enriches gameplay through real-time mods and game assist tools for noncompetitive games, and in doing so, drives deep catalog discovery and engagement

As video game players and playtime stagnated, social gaming services continued to grow both. At Discord, MAU and DAU are up ~20% vs mid-2021

Though broadly considered a communications platform; Discord is hyper-indexed to gamers especially high-engagement;, social, and multi-platform gamers

One in five Discord users (or 4OMM total) use the app to stream gameplay to their friends each month and just under one in three watches monthly

Discords in disproportionate discovery behavior Reeds Law at work game

Unsurprisingly Discord users have far greater gameplay diversification than typical not reverted to the mean EPYLLION

GG Discords scale and influence over game discovery "squad formation? and cross platform comms has even led PlayStation & Xbox to integrate Discord natively

Discords new ad product, Quests, is (naturally) commercial in nature but it monetizes by (and rewards users for) game-discovery; sharing, and engagement

Nintendo's own games dominated Switch content sales in part because many of the top multiplatform games arent on the device. Why? Many cant even run on it!

And while many hits are available on the Switch, the enormous performance drop

PS5 Hogwarts Legacy (@ GOFPS)

Part of the Switchs success stems from the same reason its 3rd-party support was so modest it launched with a 3-year-old, mid-range; and underclocked GPU

Â· Two Clusters (256 CUDA Cores + 256 Shader Cores)
Â· GPU 700-9OOMHz
Â· 64-bit Memory Interface
Â· No ray tracing capability
Â· 25.6 GBps Bandwidth
Â· No DLIDLSS AI rendering

Though Switch 2s GPU is also expected to be underweight' in 2025, it should GG adequately support most modern games thus

Â· Two Clusters (256 CUDA Cores + 256 Shader Cores)
Â· GPU 700-9OOMHz
Â· 64-bit Memory Interface
Â· No ray tracing capability
Â· 25.6 GBps Bandwidth
Â· No DLIDLSS AI rendering
One Cluster (1,536 CUDA Cores + 256 Shader Cores) Â·
GPU 1.5-1.6 GHz Â·
128-bit Memory Interface Â·
Gen ray tracing Â· 2nd
102 Bandwidth Â· GBps
Gen DLIDLSS Al rendering Â· 3rd

And as the Switch is the #2 livingroom console ever; the sole growth driver in most markets, and also fully portable; a 3rd-party capable Switch 2 is a Big Deal

Steam Deck 2 officially confirmed by Valve

Sony Working on Handheld Console for PS5 Games to Rival Switch

Nintendo's Switch has dominated mobile console space for years

livingroom plus

Xbox confirms that its working ona handheld here's what we know

Is Xbox working on a Steam Deck competitor?

games ~an average of 5 per device vs. 1.5-2 SonylMicrosoft 1P titles on PSIXbox

Valve is another unique handheld beneficiary; as Steam boasts PCs largest social with share accelerating

Steam-based handhelds give players access to $75-150B in game entitlements locked to Steam (plus SteamworkslKeys) and its full player and achievements graph

The potency of Steam's lock-in explains Epics PC store challenge despite ~$7OB in game giveaways (by MSRP), its generating only S3OOMM in 3rd-party spendlyear

Valve is also set to disrupt livingroom consoles bringing its $1OOB in entitlements to the TV, plus its super-scaled social graph and PC-functionalitylsocial integrationsEPYLLION

@SadlyItsBradley

Valve Fremont" has more evidence of being a new SteamOS hardware device

@FoxletFox in my Discord found more connections of F

But also that Quanta Computer; Valve's Steam Deck manufacturer; is giving feedback on it

le: 11/11724: BFing in debug changes from quanta, 0:03:00 port_b conns } , 03:00 port_c_conns } ,

AMD Lilac is likely the raw developer board provided for the platform that Valve planned to use until the first Fremont board finished

F7 is the identifier used for the firmware powering each Steam Deck

F7A F7Aerith (became Jupiter/LCD) F7G F7Galileo (OLED) F7F F7Fremont

Download the set of

For games on Steam

For hardware shipping with the Steam Client

For brick & mortar establishments offering Steam on public computers

For hardware shipping with Valve approved Steam Link compatibility

operating system, implemented in close collaboration with Valve

For hardware 'shipping with Valve approved controller inputs

For VR hardware: communicates different Steam VR feature integration

specific Steam VR features

GG 'unfulfilled promise' that mobile gaming should have onboarded millions to higher fidelity (or AAIAAA) gaming

GG But mobile did grow the high-fidelity gaming audience. Mid-Core titles are

Indeed, annual spend on mid-core (including some de facto hardcore) mobile games once passed, and is now not far from total spend on ConsolelPC content

and shrunk in recent years, there are four potential drivers of future growth

While casual mobile titles, generations now grow up native to 3D gameplay and on mobile prior

generation that grew up playing 3D free-to-play titles on a hand-me-down iPad, spending $500 on a gaming-only console just to be able to play- is absurd

Today; ~40 million people own a grade Gen 8 console specs. By 2030, a billion people will have such a device

Meanwhile; cloud gaming continues to scale as latency broadband improve PC stores connect their entitlements, and regulators open up mobile devices and

1 think [cloud gaming] is years away from being a mainstream way people play. And mean years, like years and years_. Let's take Netflix. It's 20 years old at this point, so it took two decades for us to Cards and Game of Thrones are some of the biggest shows in the planet and mainly think game streaming will there faster than 20 years; get get

we'll have a global service that can reach everybody and the infrastructure to reach customer with a consistent and high-quality internet service, but that's going to take time. Phil Spencer, Microsoft Gaming CEO, in 2019 any

migrate to the 'best possible screen

And though there tend to be high creative, technical, and financial costs to adapt ConsolelPC-centric titles to mobile

But focusing on the direct share of unique users + spend is too narrow; especially for multiplayer titles. Reeds Law: network value grows exponentially with users

In other words, mobile may have been a small share of Fortnite revenues but this is partly because it s0 substantially grew non-mobile revenues, too

Recall that while mobile gaming spend has stalled and discoverylsupply shriveled, app store profits exceed those of all (non-China) publisherslplatforms in total

Opening up iOSlAndroids app platforms could revive install growth, improve gamemaker margins, and renew innovations in over half the video game market

After years of false progress, there's evidence that iOSIAndroids app platforms might soon start to open up

Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge Google must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google apps and distribute third-party stores. Play

Oct 7,2024,248 PM EDT

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Apple to Face First EU Fine Under Blocs Digital Markets Act

By Samuel Stolton

November 5, 2024 at 3.45 PM EST Updated on November 5 2024 at 4.05 PM EST

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Union's new digital antitrust rules for Big Tech, representing an escalation of clash with regulators over the dominance of its hugely profitable App Store:

Watchdogs are readying the penalty after the iPhone maker failed to allow app developers to steer users to cheaper deals and offers outside of the App Store, according to people familiar with the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Microsoft will open a mobile-game store to challenge Apple, Google

Epic's dream is starting to come true its store will be preinstalled on 'millions' of Android phones TelefÃ³nica will the Epic Games Store to Samsung devices in among others. bring

And as mobile opens, Steam has the opportunity to extend its entitlements and

Over only a few years, indie-developed mods spawned the largest AAA game genre in history one adapted (andlor created) by the very largest gamemakers globally

2016

2018

Yet battle royales were not a new idea. Rather; they were newly possible ideas as a result of various technological advances

For all their sophistication; most of today's top games use less data than "legacy"

Some new video games are cloud streaming 5-12 GB of data per hour; not as a

map reproducing nearly all of our world (3T unique trees, 1.5B buildings; etc.)

in environmental detail (e.g. lift is affected heat density of 6,400 surfaces) by

Early Access

v.1/16/2025

Microsoft Flight Simulator is possible due to a vast number of solutions across

In 2024, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration announced helicopter pilots could receive credit toward their pilot ratings on Loft Dynamics VR systems

reach and role game

Its possible to identify some technical catalysts for new genres, but not how far they must mature, their cross-dependencies (inc. with Al), or what theyll make

Fortnite has 100 players per server because Epic couldn't make 200 Though this is probably a slight simplification and exaggeration; there are still significant

constraints to how many users can be in a shared simulation at once constraints that shape fidelitys functionality, map genre, and gameplay mechanic. As this barrier grows;, what might the new battle be? And how might it introduce new monetization models, cultural events;, or players to video size, royale"

Cloud-native games are generally expected to focus on mass concurrency and high persistence (and, of course, require high levels of bandwidth). Even so, there's a that games that are built for cloud streaming, rather than built for traditional rendering and then cloud streamed, might produce particularly they hope

To some, Generative Al may be a Holy Grail" that helps halt cost escalation and GG reduces

âª to market trends); delay
âª Lower cost of development and support (enabling viability at lower sales or userbases)
âª More iteration (improving quality)
Higher volumes of GAAS content (improving retention and engagement) âª
Expanded UGC functionality and ease-of-âª (improving engagement; quality; and developer economics)
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Greater personalization (driving sense of immersion) âª

Reminder: industry-wide content development spend has surged 90% since 2017 2x the rate of consumer spend growth, and 3.7x that of ConsolelPCIVR spend

efficiency at least not directly: Instead, its altogether new genreslexperiences

Specifically; the researchers assembled a town equipped with houses and dormitories; colleges and offices; grocery stores and bars; and populated with 25 autonomous agents powered by large language models modified to store a synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections; and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior:

After researchers prompted one NPC to host a Valentine's where she worked decorating; The friend then did so and revealed that she had a crush on another NPC; whom the NPC then also invited to the party: At the partys scheduled 5 p.m. start; all five NPCs arrived on time; having rearranged their to accommodate the event ~including the crush, Klaus. Day days

Figure 1: Generative agents are believable simulacra of human behavior for interactive applications. In this work; we demonstrate and intervene as agents plan their share news, form relationships, and coordinate group activities. days,

Family House

Common Room

Bathroom

Kitchen

Common

room

Bedrooms

Garden

Book Shelf

Table

efficiency at least not directly: Instead, its altogether new genreslexperiences

Some of these experiences are technically viable without Generative Al, but their

After the simulation concluded, each behavior of each agent was reviewed and evaluated for believability using common behavioral models TrueSkill, Microsoft Xbox Lives skill-based matchmaking system) and variance tests (Kruskal-Wallis). (e.g,

Each agent was also interviewed= for 'self-knowledge" (details on their met and what happened during the will do and when), reactions? (what would do in case of a fire or upon seeing a friend on the street), and reflections? (what inspires them or what would for another agents birthday) . they they they they buy

Independent human "crowdworkers' were also hired and asked to watch each agents two-day experience and then role-play as these agents while answering the same questions. The StanfordlGoogle researchers found that the LLM agents consistently outperformed their human role-players and exceeded the believability benchmark