Continuing Trends in Gaming in 2023

By Lynne Pearce

I always get excited to look back at the year and then look forward to the growth in the gaming industry, which is one of the fast-growing trends in the world, driven by the massive push towards Web3 and the metaverse.

However, to put this into perspective, I start off by looking at the industries that will always be in demand globally, at least for the foreseeable future. Food is always top of mind (for me anyway) and obviously big pharma, who have experienced ridiculously impressive growth and profitability over the past few years. Another growing trend around the world is Healthcare, particularly with regards to technological advances and developments in transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), cloud computing, blockchain, and super-fast network protocols like 5G.

In no order of importance, other than being what I think will be the top trends continuing through 2023, I will list these separately below.

The Power of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) – and Humans

AI has grown exponentially over the past few years and will continue its momentum unabated into 2023, with data scientists and researchers finding even more innovative ways of using AI. The area of AI that fascinates me the most is the power of AI – and human responses to either adopting it or finding ways of fighting the intelligence.

I read a fascinating article by Topy Shapshat in The Daily Maverick recently on the fight between Chinese protestors and how they cleverly found a way around AI, which is massively and widely used by the Chines government to control every movement of their citizens daily.

China has been rocked by Covid lockdown protests in the past few weeks after a fire in Urumqi killed 10 people in a locked-down building that many people believe prevented victims from escaping and firefighters from getting in. This wave of protest has been likened to the student uprisings in 1989 that culminated in the infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown.

To counter these artificial intelligence (AI) forms of monitoring, angry protesters are holding up blank pieces of paper. To the AI systems trained to pick up words or phrases that are banned, these appear as just blank white pages. But to us, as humans, well, we can read between the lines, resulting in this simple act of defiance – it suddenly becomes a powerful symbol.

Chinese citizens also disguise protest videos with effects, filters or playing Western songs that have similar protest themes. This kind of smart skirting of the strict censorship rules shows that the human brain — and its ability to think laterally and understand humour — can still thwart the literal logic of AI and its algorithms. Score 1 for humans and 0 for AI.

Relating AI trends back to the gaming industry, all you have to do is think of the simple bot, which is widely used in the gaming industry. Humans do not even realise they are playing against bots when gaming, and this has changed the gaming experience as AI technological advances become even smarter!

CLOUD GAMING
In addition, with Cloud gaming and with the speed of 5G on mobile, the gaming market has significant future growth potential. Nowadays, players do not need to download and install casino games, which was a huge blocker to developing countries, like Latin America and in particular, the esports gaming market in Brazil. In India and Africa, the massive rollout of 5G and the low cost of cloud gaming has opened up the market for gaming companies, who are able to install their games on their servers and make them easily accessible on

web browsers to players in these regions.
Couple that with augmented and virtual reality (VR), which allows players to view games in real time on their devices, these technologies offer them a fantastic virtual gaming experience with awesome 3D graphics with dream like real-world effects. This technology was estimated at $11.56 billion in 2019 and is projected to increase yearly at a CAGR of 30.2% over the next few years.

ESPORTS
Esports (electronic sports) has been around for many years, but I have seen rapid adoption on a global scale within igaming since the lockdowns in 2020, projected to be well over $2 billion by the end of 2022 and increasing to $3.6 billion by 2025 by various research studies that I have read. Newzoo reported that esports would be expected to increase at an annual pace of 10.4%, with more than 351 million casual viewers and over 295 million spectator enthusiasts, bringing the total viewership to 646 million and counting, probably because this trend is as popular for women as it was for the guys previously. One of the reasons of its huge popularity globally are the esports tournaments for professional teams and players – and the awesome high-tech elements, video, special effects and fast action-packed graphics, which makes for a truly immersive experience for all, whether online or in stadiums around the world.

BLOCKCHAIN
Other than reported issues of fraudulent activities, there are many advantages of using blockchain in the gaming industry. Blockchain eliminates the need for intermediaries when making deposits and withdrawals for the players, which saves time and money, and provides transparency and immutability, which are essential for ensuring fair play.
Some of the top blockchain games include Axie Infinity, Decentral and and Alien Worlds. Decentralized blockchains open the door to verifiable digital ownership, enabling players to truly own the items they play with and with the ever-growing trend of NFTs, I believe this will continue into 2023 with a number of gaming companies adopting NFT payments for gaming, entry into events and in-app purchasing.

These are just a few of the trends will continue to grow and expand with added innovations and technologies throughout 2023, assisting in driving the gaming industry to even greater immersive and enjoyable experiences for the players and profitability for the gaming industry overall.