Newzoo analysts have prepared a list of trends of the outgoing year and a forecast for the next year. There are about subscriptions, money, VR and the cloud.
General by market
- Newzoo forecasts a 7.3% increase in global market turnover. In 2020, he should earn $160 billion.
- At the same time, the pace of sales of gaming devices and software will increase very slowly. Consoles are waiting for the slowest growth since 2015. But at the end of 2020, with the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the market will enter a new phase of growth.
- Mobile games will be the fastest growing segment of the year. Their income may rise by 11.6% year-on-year.
- The drivers of the industry will be emerging markets: the Middle East, North Africa, India, Southeast Asia. Gaming revenue in each of these regions expects double-digit growth.
Xbox Series XTrend: Subscription services and cloud gaming
- There will be even more services that allow you to play by subscription in the coming year. Recall that only in 2019, Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass, and Uplay+ were launched almost at the same time. And they are already turning into marketable publishing platforms, offering developers an advance for the creation of exclusive games.
- Based on this, Newzoo confidently calls the subscription the boom of 2020. But he advises to remember that such sites have to compete with each other, and with game services, and even with Netflix, Disney+, HBO.
It is also necessary to separate services like Apple Arcade and cloud streaming platforms with a subscription to games. The latter includes, for example, Google Stadia. Platforms like her are not expected to grow rapidly. Interest in cloud gaming in 2020 will only become apparent on the market.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the infrastructure for the full operation of games in the cloud has not yet been debugged. This was perfectly demonstrated by the problematic launch of Stadia.
Secondly, it is unclear whether cloud gaming will be able to offer the player the same (or greater) experience as traditional.
Thirdly, so far there are few exclusive titles in the cloud. The vast majority of products are available on other platforms, and it is difficult to entice players into streaming gaming.
However, the situation can still be reversed by the release of Microsoft xCloud. The release of the platform is just next year.
Google StadiaTrend: Monetization and stores
- Existing monetization models are changing. With the proliferation of subscription services, new ways to monetize games are emerging. The situation was also affected by the mass launch of publishers’ own stores — outside Steam and other universal platforms.
- In the past year, publishers and developers have often taken on the role of distributors and investors. They developed their own stores (Epic Games Store, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc.), invested in the development of games by third-party studios (Riot Forge). This trend is likely to continue in 2020.
Trend: VR Games
- Not so long ago, Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx — only for VR. In fact, the company wants to play on its most valuable IP. And indeed: the announcement of the product spurred sales of VR devices.
- According to Newzoo, the VR segment is stagnating so far. The reason is the shortage of gaming AAA for VR. There is a dead end situation: players are ready to take headsets only for the sake of really high-quality titles, and developers want to expand the VR audience before creating such titles. For this reason, Alyx can popularize virtual reality in a way that other applications have not been able to in recent years.
- Headsets have become more affordable on the market, and their range has grown noticeably. Among them are helmets for the mass audience (PlayStation VR) and corporate (HoloLens 2), universal and wireless (Oculus Go and Quest), as well as especially large projects (Valve Index). But, Newzoo repeats, all this abundance should be supported by sufficient gaming content.
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