As a form of entertainment, gaming has solidified itself as a mainstay of popular culture, with the number of people playing games seemingly exponentially growing as time passes.
Since the start of the 2000s, the gaming industry has taken on seismic growth and with it, huge diversification – to the point where the games themselves are no longer the only aspect of the industry. Games are often media entities within themselves with corresponding lore, films/tv shows, and physical consumer products like action figures and collectibles.
With technology continuing to advance in capability and performance daily, the hardware available for gaming purposes is always widening and improving, with technology even in day-to-day devices such as smartphones and tablets now possessing significant gaming capabilities and hosting a huge proportion of the gaming community.
Gaming has also been helped by the continued growth of social media, which has allowed international communities of gamers to come together no matter where they are and share their experiences.
Read on to find out more about the trends impacting gaming in 2022, and how they will develop over the year.
Esports
Since the late 2010s, the world of competitive online gaming has exploded in popularity, and this trend looks set to continue throughout 2022 and into the years to come. Esports is now a global phenomenon, with players at the top of their game competing in front of big crowds and even bigger Livestream audiences to win their share of staggeringly large prize pools.
While the popularity of esports was firmly on the rise before the Covid-19 pandemic, the fact that everyone had to stay indoors for months on end, plus the fact that many major sports leagues could no longer compete due to social-distancing requirements, combined to cause a boom that saw the industry hit $1 billion in revenue for the first time.
Records are expected to continue falling as 2022 signs of progress, with $2 billion in revenue predicted alongside continued viewership increases across the board.
Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming will continue to make its presence felt in 2022, but has not quite had the impact some may have predicted since its inception and appearance on the consumer market. Cloud gaming offers gamers an exciting future where there will no longer be the need to continually upgrade expensive hardware such as games consoles and GPUs, as streaming devices such as smart TVs will be all that’s needed to access the games from an online server. However, you will still need high-quality accessories such as Lenovo gaming headsets and keyboards!
There are various issues with streaming high-resolution gaming at high framerates when you don’t have an advanced, highly capable internet connection, but the advent of 5G and other superfast broadband services could see it become more mainstream in the coming year.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality continues to make steady progress in terms of users, with the technology having been familiar to gamers now for several years. The technology has struggled to gain traction for a few reasons, such as the high entry price range to purchase VR headsets and the lack of support for mainstream, popular titles. However, much like with cloud gaming, technological improvements are enabling VR devices to become more affordable, as well as increased awareness seeing big-name titles being given VR capabilities.
