The international video game landscape has been moving with overwhelming force since its earliest days, a giant wave that now encompasses virtually every medium, effectively conquering it on multiple levels: cinema, television, comics, and even podcasts deal with the subject, generating significant revenues that are set to grow even more in the coming years.
If it is true that in the past the predominant discussion concerned the transition from the systems of previous generations to those that would outperform the consoles and PCs of the twentieth century, nowadays it is much more difficult to identify trends and analyze the future of the video game world, as the offerings, publishers, and ways of enjoying the video game medium have changed, just as modern society has changed.
Di fatto, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and never as much as in this historical moment has video gaming found itself at the secular fork that sees, on one side, the enjoyment of a product as a private, home-based entertainment tool and, simply put, single-player, while on the other we are now plunging into an even more interconnected world, based on online gaming regardless of the reference genre, where experiences in Virtual and Augmented Reality are becoming a significant part of our everyday life.
This, of course, is also reflected in the long-standing question of physical and digital, a debate that is still ongoing.
According to Globenewswire, for example, comparing data and figures from recent years and in particular from 2023, which ended just a few months ago, the global online role-playing games market (a sector that has been growing exponentially since the days of Dota) is expanding more and more and, from now until 2027, will grow at an annual rate of 10.50%.
Numerals that not only appear important and raise more than legitimate reflections on how drastically the use and the very idea behind Video Games has changed, but also represent a clear and defined direction of where we are heading at full speed.
The video game is no longer a bedroom-only affair, in plain words: the future is interconnection and sharing, with everything that this entails.
Sentiamo often hear about communities, and it is precisely on this that development studios and major video game brands lay the foundational basis of their revenue, generating content designed specifically for users who, in a twentieth century that moves fast and waits for no one, consume video games in a completely different way than in the past.
Online gaming, whether role-playing and fantasy-themed or urban like any GTA, transforms the mere concept of play into a social community, made up of constant interactions.
In addition, consoles and personal computers are no longer the only holders of the scepter as the sole platforms for gaming: mobile has become widely established, and it is no coincidence that a large share of users prefer to play on their cell phones rather than on consoles.
Casual gamers invest their time very carefully, and it is interesting that 77% of people who use mobile devices for gaming are female, but that is not all: only 8% of those who play on cell phones are between twelve and eighteen years old, tangible proof that the average teenager has remained anchored to the dear old home consoles, while the remaining slice of the pie prefers something more immediate and, above all, constantly within reach.
Dated in hand, what emerges above all is a great undeniable truth: the Video Game is one of the few media capable of always keeping up with the times, adapting and often changing the perception that human beings have of the world in which they live.
