4 essential technological trends of the video game



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This is an exciting time for all types of games. From hypercasal mobile titles to global multiplayer hits, players around the world are extremely excited and engaged. This energy continues to drive new advances in game development, fueling the next wave of cloud innovation. As the gaming industry continues to push the developer's boundaries, development companies of all sizes will need to leverage cloud solutions and services to provide the flexibility and freedom to create games. incredible without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

I anticipate that four trends will affect the sector in the near future:

1. Growing exponential growth of multiplayer

To support the fast-growing multiplayer gaming industry around the world, game developers will need to take a new approach to meet the thirst of gamers looking for great gaming experiences. On a global scale, gaming systems will have to work seamlessly on hybrid and multi-cloud systems to meet the demands of gamers.

We're seeing a shift in the trend for game developers to containerize back-end workloads to more easily handle multi-layer deployments – building on Kubernetes' popularity and a trend we expect to continue . By disregarding the underlying infrastructure, containerization and open source, video game developers can run their game where it makes the most sense, while reducing costs. Management.

2. Embrace various games played across platforms

Games are evolving more and more towards platform agnosticism – and while we are in the early stages of being able to play a game on any device, we are seeing tremendous progress towards a truly multi-platform future. For developers looking to create games in this new paradigm, open source solutions are an effective way to deliver truly cross – platform services, reducing the burden on them to create their own services from scratch or from scratch. tap proprietary services.

Open source (OS) has already benefited many industries over the past 20 years, from security to science, and we will see an even greater appetite for operating solutions in the gaming industry video. Game developers can leverage a common service stack to simplify infrastructure design and customize pre-existing solutions to reduce production costs and time-consuming administrative tasks.

As boundaries between players around the world are torn down by increasing Internet connectivity and access to better gaming hardware at a lower cost, the gaming community gathers in open source forums to create tools and services reducing barriers to entry into the market. create a great game

3. The free game requires robust analysis and new content.

Historically, mobile companies have used data and analytics to optimize monetization and engagement of games. The continuous optimization cycle that pioneered the mobile was fueled by the explosion of the amount of data available to developers. As platform barriers continue to fall, and as we watch the transition of games from all platforms to game models as a service, move from post-event analysis to predictive modeling of games. Player results will be even more important to provide better player experiences and retain them. .

Finally, gaming as a service involves not only longer monetization cycles, but also shorter content development cycles and additional pressure on content development teams. To remain relevant, successful games must provide an insurmountable stream of content updates, adding a layer of dynamism to the industry. Developers will need tools and knowledge to massively accelerate their speed to meet the demand of players and, more importantly, to respond effectively.

4. Continuation of innovations in IA and ML

Artificial Intelligence's past is closely tied to the gaming industry and the future of this industry will be incredibly linked to AI. Much of Google's success in artificial intelligence is in part due to Deepmind, who tested the algorithms on various Atari games. The first GPUs, mainly used for graphical rendering, proved extremely useful for learning machine learning (ML) models and we saw AI tested in games like AlphaGo and Starcraft. . It is therefore not surprising that the future of games lies in artificial intelligence. Recent advances in AI are inextricably linked to gambling and we have already seen positive effects: companies can now predict the value of a gamer's lifetime, detect toxicity and fraud, and improve the skill level of non-player characters.

But the truth is that we just scratch the surface of what the AI ​​can do in games. There are opportunities for generative development. Imagine game levels that change automatically to match the skill level of the player. In addition, new types of game modalities will be invented as we continue to better codify the human attributes of understanding of vision, speech, and feelings, and to combine these abilities with the increasing progress of AR and the RV. For example, voice control is currently added to many games, but this is just the beginning. Artificial intelligence will change the way we play.

Conclusion

As we look to the future of the video game industry, the biggest question the gaming company faces today is developers. How, as a video game industry, do we continue to reduce the difficulty of creating a great game and allowing it to succeed?

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that all these developments will spark an explosion of creativity in this increasingly diverse group of developers. Developers from different countries and all walks of life will start creating their own successful games, and new ideas and different types of games will be introduced to the general public. It's never the most exciting time to be a game developer.

(Editor's Note: The author is not involved in the creation of Google Stadia.)

Sunil Rayan leads product, engineering, and enterprise teams on Google Cloud to bring more innovative solutions to game developers around the world.

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