We are starting to see the expected drop in Pokemon Go users now that the fad has passed. It raked in millions of dollars in purchasables despite being a “free” game. It was downloaded at least 100 million times on the Google Play store alone. There were literally stampedes in the streets over catching a rare Pokemon. Pokemon Go, around its release, was effectively synonymous with AR gaming. The Rise of Pokémon Go and the Future of AR Gamers will be all too happy to move to a new release should they get bored with their current choice. That being said, without a strong release and constant updates, multiplayer games in the future are at the constant risk of irrelevancy. With a larger player base, the expanding gaming market and easier internet access worldwide, the success of these games could simply be the continued result of an increasing demand for multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer shooters have always been a staple of gaming, but with games such as Minecraft laying down the path years ago and games such as Ark: Survival Evolved or Rust providing survival multiplayer elements, there is now a multiplayer shooter for everyone’s speed.
While multiplayer gaming has always been a huge part of the gaming industry, this year has seen an uptrend in the popularity of online multiplayer gaming and the number of AAA multiplayer focused titles, such as Overwatch, Battlefield One and Titanfall 2.
We are likely to see imitators in the future, although how they’ll expand upon the genre remains to be seen. Players likely enjoy the pick-up-and-play nature of the title as well as the shift from the more traditional shooters, such as Call of Duty or Battlefield. While the Hero Shooter isn’t necessarily a new concept (Team Fortress 2 was popular years before Overwatch was even heard of), Overwatch brought it up to date and put its massive marketing team behind it. While we can’t say for certain how many people still play Overwatch regularly to this date, over 20 million people registered to play as of October, and the community is holding strong.
INDIE GAMES OF 2016 SIMULATOR
Will the rise of the walking simulator signal to developers that gamers are demanding more crafted worlds and enriching stories from their games? Will the pacing of games change as a result? The industry will certainly keep making walking simulators, but a main point of interest will be in seeing how aspects of these games bleed into other genres.Īs far as direct market competition stories went, there was no larger industry competition than that between Battleborn and Overwatch, with Blizzard’s Titan clearly proving itself to be the victor in the eyes of the general gamer, for good or for ill. Gamers responded well to the rich worlds and the idea of being in a unique version of an interactive storybook. On paper, most people would consider them boring, but the quality and success of games such as Firewatch and the console version of Gone Home speak otherwise. Let’s look at some of this year’s biggest successes (and failures) and see what we can determine:įew people would have predicted the success of the walking simulator. This leads to a culture of experimentation and renewal to a certain degree, and while some aspects of gaming are cemented, some of the biggest releases of the year speak otherwise. Amazing graphics are considered a standard now instead of a feature. Gamers get bored quickly with the same mechanics and same genres. However, gaming is an industry that relies on reinventing itself regularly. Gaming news is becoming mainstream news, especially when stampedes are involved. Medium-sized games, such as Rocket League, are becoming huge hits and maintaining massive player bases. Perhaps now more than ever we are seeing regular releases for blockbuster titles and sales to match.
This year was certainly an interesting one for the gaming industry.