It seems that we are leveling up this year. Here are the topics we will be following:
🤝 Digital Fairness Act: Debates on digital fairness will spread throughout the gaming world and invite new players into the public debate. The stakes are high, as the law is merely a crystallization of the prevailing cultural debate.
📢 The amplification of culture wars: numerous key elections (US midterms, Brazilian presidential elections) and unpredictable geopolitical events will provide fertile ground for the spread of ideological struggle. International links are already being forged. The rules of the game have changed.
💣 Cybersecurity and warfare: the world of video games is being invaded by various players in the current hybrid wars. The range of actions is very broad: cyberattacks, UGC and criminal uses around the world, recruitment on gaming social networks. A real hotbed for moral panic to come.
🎮 Emergence of amateur video games: lower entry costs for game creation and the massification of UGC productions driven by platforms are completely changing the practices of Gen Alpha. Video games as narrative or as system: the debate between narratologists and ludologists is an old one. A return to arcade games seems inevitable.
📉 Towards a gradual return to industrial rationality: Clair Obscur’s victory at the Game Awards is an explicit call for the disinflation of technical production costs, where the marginal gain of each euro invested to increase a tech feature inevitably converges towards negative profitability. Combined with the new practices of Gen Alpha, AAA is doomed to change category.
GTAVI. We’ll come back to that.
🏆 We are finalizing a report on Europe’s place in the global video game industry through an analysis of the last 11 years of the Game Awards. The results are exciting, with Europe performing really well.
Happy New Year to all.