Gaming Trends in 2021: What is the Future of Gaming?

Gaming allows you to expand beyond the possible and engage in environments that are the products of your wildest fantasies. Obsessed with the zombie apocalypse and its repercussions on the world, as we know it? Play The Last of Us II, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and Holdout, which are some of the latest titles in the zombie survival genre, and you’ll experience a rush of adrenaline going down your body, tingling at the tips of your fingers. That’s the effect gaming has on the modern generation. It reinvigorates a collective social interest and catches the eye of everyone, regardless of their age and circumstance.

Like the colors in a rainbow, gaming comprises different shades. You can play a game online or offline, on a dedicated console or a smartphone, with other players or alone. Most of the popular games these days are played online, for which the presence of a high-speed internet connection is a MUST. Cox WiFi packages have been known to cater to the needs of gamers especially with their Elite Gamer extension, which minimizes the ping rate and streamlines server response. Besides, gaming is something that has helped many people survive the pandemic lockdown anxiety and paranoia. It offers an escape from the worries of the world and is a cathartic activity, overall. With the global interest in gaming going on the rise generally, what sort of trends will you see in 2021? In fact, what is the future of gaming? Let’s check everything out below.

Next-Gen Consoles

Technological upgrades come out every year and replace the older versions of devices. The Samsung cell phone you had back in 2012 pales in comparison to the Galaxy S21 smartphone, which offers next-gen specs and a thousand times more convenience. Similarly, the gaming industry has progressed by leaps and bounds, too. Only last year, Sony released the PlayStation 5, and Microsoft rolled out the Xbox X series for high-end gamers. You can enjoy ultra-realistic graphics and the smoothest gameplay known to humankind. The latest consoles are also equipped with advanced microchips, which amplify the processing speed and in turn, boost your performance in the game. So, it would not be wrong to say that we’ll be seeing newer versions of gaming consoles in 2021 with remarkable built-in technology and excellent throughput.

Mobile Integration

We do everything on our smartphones, these days, from online banking to video conferencing. Mobile phones lend us the ease of completing our day-to-day tasks with utmost efficiency. Their compact size offers the highest portability, allowing you to multitask like a pro. Today’s mobile phones are also ‘smart’ with AI integrated into them, and internet-enabled, letting you surf the web from anywhere there’s connectivity. What’s more, you can use your smartphone for gaming, too. Research shows that at least 2.2 billion people around the world have adopted mobile phones as a medium for playing games over the last ten years. The market revenue from mobile gaming has also expanded exponentially and is expected to grow by 59 percent in the years to come. So, the trend of mobile gaming will continue to rise in 2021, as well.

5G Adoption

Along with mobile gaming, mobile internet technology has also developed to a great extent. 5G is around the corner, supporting the fastest speeds up to 10 Gbps. How does it work? 5G taps into the sophisticated fiber broadband networks and then disperses the rocket-high speeds wirelessly through a string of interconnected towers. For gamers, this is great news. With 5G-enabled smartphones, they can play heavy MMORP games on their sleek devices with a global team while only facing one millisecond of ping delay. This means that their actions will be translated faster in a game and they can compete well with professional players. Downloading games will also become seamless with 5G. Instead of an hour, you’ll be able to download a game in a matter of minutes.

eSports Shift

Watching video games has become a substantial trend that’ll creep into 2021, as well. Online users, mostly aged 18 to 25 years, now prefer to watch live streams of gameplay rather than indulging in the games directly. This has turned gaming into an entertainment gateway. So much so that in place of actual sports, video game spectating has turned into a norm, especially among the millennials. Social media platforms have also played a part in this. I know several people in my circle who tune into  Twitch, YouTube, and other eSports platforms to watch their favorite gamers play a game in real-time. The live streaming technology gives them the freedom to not only view the games as they unfold but also to participate in how it turns out. Once you log into a live game stream, you can send your feedback to the gamer in real-time through the comment box and react to the gameplay with emoticons. So, the year 2021 will bring about more live-stream participation from online spectators in the eSports domain.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, the world of gaming continues to innovate. Mobile gaming, 5G, newer consoles, and eSports interactions are some of the trends that you will see in 2021. Besides these, augmented reality gaming, virtual reality gaming, cloud-based gaming, and facial recognition software have also entered the industry, and constitute the future of gaming, for sure.