Last Friday, July 25th, 2014, a panel was held for the discussion of the future of video games. Below is a picture of the panelists with a short bio for each person:
David Baxter – Moderator – Brand Activation Manager at Wikipad, which is a portable gaming tablet powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor with video-game optimized capabilities.
Jon Jacobs – Actor, entrepreneur, director, producer, writer and creator of the avatar Neverdie from the MMO Entropia Universe.
Rick Sanchez – Former vice president of IGN Entertainment, currently vice president of product & marketing at OnLive
Cas Anvar – Actor, producer, and voice of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
Randy Pitchford – President & CEO of Gearbox Software.
Jeremy Snead – Director of Video Games: The Movie.
Panel Recap
The panel started off by showing a clip of Video Games: The Movie, which included topics such as cloud gaming and video game storylines. A proper ratio for the difficulty of video games was determined, and it should be equal between frustration and reward. Another guideline to follow when creating video games is to make it easy to play, yet hard to master. After the discussion about the difficulty of video games concluded, the conversation started venturing into how the storyline impacts video games. The panelists agreed that the story of the game mattered much more than the technology or graphics present in the game. Cas Anvar went as far as to say that because of the immersion from stories that users experience while playing video games, the video game market will completely eclipse the television and movie market wthin the next 5 to 10 years.
Another discussion was held about how in the early 2000’s, video game companies started to get away from the storylines of video games and focuses too heavily on graphics. This was because of the fast-changing technological capabilities that the industry was experiencing (HD graphics, motion controls, etc…) The panelists also agreed that gamers fall in love and with and remember the characters and their dilemmas in games, not the 1080p 60fps graphical capabilities of them.
The conversation then forwarded to the cloud gaming as a potential future way of playing video games. Two companies involved in the panel were Wikipad and OnLive. Wikipad is a portable tablet which as a powerful processor that is video game optimized. OnLive is a cloud service that allows users to subscribe and play video games via the cloud on most devices. Rick Sanchez, VP of product & marketing at OnLive, stated that broadband speeds are doubling every 18 months, allowing the real potential use for cloud gaming to be a major way to play video games in the future. Other future ways of playing video games will include completely immersed virtual reality and brain manipulation. It was determined that whichever one would allow a frictionless experience would be the one to become popular and prosper as a futuristic method of playing video games.
Overall, The Future of Gaming Panel at Gam3rCon 2014 was full of bold ideas, innovative concepts, and major players in the video game industry. That concluded the recap for the panel.
I have always enjoyed playing video games and am a programming team lead for a video game company. I co-founded Gaming Cypher because I enjoy the gaming community and would like to provide the best news service around. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will make sure to get back to you quickly.
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