The Gaming Trends Set to Shape 2021

Feb 21,2021 - (Free)

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2020 saw the global gaming industry achieve stratospheric levels of growth. Becoming the most popular method of home entertainment, gaming as a whole was reported to have pulled in revenues worth $159 billion during those 12 months.

Consumers are now more engaged with gaming than ever before. Last year saw eSports competitions gain more television airtime than traditional sports, while global pre-sale levels for the new wave of next-gen gaming consoles released in the latter months of the year exceeded all expectations.

With the industry well on track to achieve a forecasted total value of over $200 billion in two years’ time, what’s in store for gaming here in 2021?

Next-Generation Hardware

If CES 2021 is anything to go by, the PS5 and Xbox Series X are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to next-gen gaming hardware. In 2021, it’s the turn of PC gaming to get a hardware boost in the form of high-end gaming laptops and immersive graphics cards.

Notable gaming brands like Asus ROG and Lenovo Legion showcased their latest lineup of gaming laptops that now all feature AMD’s Ryzen 5000 platform. The newest ROG models, in particular, will now run on an RTX 3080 core, a first for AMD laptops.

For gamers, this means heightened levels of performance, since AMD cores significantly outperform Intel cores when it comes to gaming performance.

Dedicated gaming laptops are getting more portable and lighter than ever before, too, thanks to increased innovation from the new NVIDIA GeForce range. Asus showcased the smallest ever eGPU made with a mobile RTX 3080 in the form of its 13-inch ROG X13.

It’s not just high-end gaming that’s getting a boost, mid-range PC gaming will be given a makeover this year thanks to yet more innovation from Nvidia. New mid-range graphics cards like the RTX 3060 ($329 RRP) are set to deliver raw gaming power for the PC at a fraction of the cost of the Quadro RTX 8000 ($6999 RRP).

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Virtual Reality will achieve Mainstream Viability

It’s been 8 years since the first home-use VR headset was released onto the market. Although this advanced tech has been hanging around on the fringes of the gaming industry since then, 2021 is set to be the year when we start to take it seriously as a major trend in gaming.

Virtual reality has slowly but surely been making its mark on various gaming markets, including the iGaming market, where the technology is being utilized to offer immersive environments and “unprecedented realism” in verticals like online poker. Additionally, the release of Half-Life: Alyx back in March 2020 signaled a big shift toward mainstream viability for this advanced technology.

The falling prices of VR headsets combined with significant improvements made to VR tech as a whole are making this segment of the gaming industry less prohibitive to the average gamer. A standalone headset costing $300 is more appealing than one designed to be used in conjunction with a console for twice the amount. Meanwhile, updates like improved motion tracking and added in-game immersion in the current wave of VR are creating gaming experiences that are worth investing in.

5G Rollout will take Cloud Gaming to the Next Level

Cloud gaming was one of the hottest gaming trends of 2020, leading mainstream manufacturers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Sony to expand further into the market. The sector has previously been forecast to grow at a modest CAGR of 40% across the decade, but the global deployment of 5G could provide both a smoother transition and widespread adoption of cloud gaming in a much shorter time span.

While the 5G rollout is currently facing numerous challenges that, if unresolved, will be a significant barrier to mainstream integration, the benefits that this new technology will bring to the gaming industry are many. Faster connection speeds, improved network latency, and massive server availability are the keys to take cloud gaming to the next level, and can all be achieved with 5G technology.