Horst • VanderMolen (Joost van Dreunen) is the founder of market research firm SuperData Research, in his article, we talked about the six trend in 2019 the gaming industry. Sites Game gyro did compile.
The first trend is that gamers will be the "canary in the coal mine" (canary in a coal mine), to test the feasibility of new technology to large technology companies. Canaries are very sensitive to human difficult to detect carbon monoxide and other toxic gases, was the miners early warning tool to detect toxic gases. Now, Amazon, Tencent, Google, Microsoft and other companies, have their own data centers and cloud technology, gamers can help the reliability of these companies to test new technologies, large companies can also show in the game based on new technologies to decide whether or not to introduce it to the mainstream consumer groups.
Second, PC (computer) games market fragmentation. Steam game store's parent company Villefort (Valve) company, has a monopoly in this market for over ten years, in the past, small game makers can only be invested in the product Steam game store, there is no other choice. Now the emergence of new competitors, such as Epic Games Mall and Discord game Mall. VanderMolen believe that the emergence of these platforms for consumers and game developers business is a good sign: consumers can buy the game at a lower price, have more choices; increased game development company's sales channels, reduce development risk.
Third, cross-platform barriers will be broken. Today, the status of the game industry is the "Most Entertaining events remain in the respective walled garden." That is to say, it did not get through between your phone, PC, game consoles and other platforms, the same game player, if on a different platform, you can not come online. However, VanderMolen believe play games across platforms in 2019 will become ubiquitous. "Fortress of the Night" is a cross-platform game, it's a huge success prompted the major platform willing to friendly cooperation, allowing the player to different platforms to achieve online.
Fourth, the subscription service will pull the game sales. Amazon's live gaming platform launched Twitch paid "subscription", the user can avoid advertising, buying new games with discount prices. Microsoft's Game Pass paid subscription service, allowing users to access the growing number of game library, rather than paying for a single game. VanderMolen introduced, there will be more big companies to adopt this profit model, to deal with the slowdown in hardware sales.
Fifth, the video game will be faced with more and more regulations for underage users. VanderMolen introduced in 2019, the gaming industry that continues to boom will not be like before, a number of trends suggest that the game industry will be moving "competition is more focused, more stringent government regulation" direction.
Sixth, with the advent of economic winter, the game industry's growth will slow down. For this, VanderMolen do the analysis from three aspects: First, mobile games in different parts of the market are gradually showing the saturation, the host population increased price sensitivity, the host company may further reduce the hardware price. Second, with the mainstream of the development of the game, which in the past has been in the industry in the field of "counter-cyclical", then will change with changes in overall consumer spending. Third, investors are now trading at a massive game stocks, which means that there will be more game companies tend to take a conservative strategy will not attempt content creation.