I remember when I was a child and I was so excited for school to end so I could head down to the local arcade to play my favorite video games. Street fighter. Dance Dance Revolution. Pac Man. All the classics were there. But it wasn’t just that I wanted to go down to the arcade. It was that I had to. Video gaming has come a long way from what it once was. Most arcades have since shut down because everything is all home consoles and gaming PCs now.
It would be silly to say that gaming isn’t popular. But just how popular is it? And more importantly, how much more popular is it going to become over the next few years?
The Rise Of Gaming
How did gaming go from something fringe that was relegated to arcades to the world-spanning mega-industry we have today? Well we have to look at the evolution of modern games. As our technology advanced so did our ability to create new games. Soon the age of pixel games was left behind as we moved into the realm of fully rendered 3D games. And now modern games are even stepping into the world of Virtual reality.
You only need to look at any modern game tier list to see which kinds of games are dominating the industry. Anything that takes big new leaps in terms of graphics or gameplay ideas. Titles like Death Stranding were a huge jump in graphics. While games like Disco Elysium did something new with the RPG genre that will be talked about for generations to come.
Multiplayer Gaming
One of the biggest changes to gaming in the last twenty years was the change made to multiplayer gaming. Originally you needed to be in the same room as someone to play a video game with them. And you often needed to be on the same gaming system. But the internet changed all that.
Modern multiplayer games are mostly online. Letting players from across the globe come together to battle it out on their favorite title. And this led to gaming becoming far more popular than it ever was before. A lot of people don’t enjoy single player games. They revel in the sense of community that comes with multiplayer gaming. And once it became far easier to play multiplayer games, more and more people started playing.
The global pandemic was also a huge contributing factor in the increasing popularity of gaming. Thousands upon thousands of people who had never gambled before were suddenly looking for new hobbies in lockdown. And gaming offered them both a reprieve from their boredom as well as a method of engaging with their friends. And even now that the world is slowly returning to normal, we are still feeling the effects of the pandemic in a lot of ways. People are still going out a lot less. Which means they are often gaming a lot more.
ESports
Another huge factor in the soaring popularity of video games is the world of Esports. This is exactly what it sounds like. Gaming as a sport. Some people may scoff at this idea. But it is no different to any sport. Games require mental and physical determination and a lot of training and skill to be good at them.
A lot of games put players into teams and make them compete against another team. Much like most traditional sports. Shooters and MOBA games, such as Call of Duty or League of Legends, are two great examples of games that have become very popular sports. Tournaments for these games attract millions of viewers each year and the top prizes can sit near millions of dollars too.
More and more people each year aspire to become a pro-gamer. And this trend isn’t going to go away anytime soon. So we predict that, as long as Esports sticks arounds, we will see the popularity of gaming continue to rise unhindered over the next few years. Which is great because it means we will have better games, stronger consoles, and more people to enjoy playing games with each and every year.
