Video games' future is more than the Metaverse: Let's talk 'hyper digital reality' | Playable Futures
Steven Ma
Tuesday 8th February 2022
Playable Futures is a collection of insights, interviews and articles from global games leaders sharing their visions of where the industry will go next. This article series has been brought to you by GamesIndustry.biz, Ukie, Sumo Group and Diva.
It wasn't long ago that video gaming meant playing Pong in an arcade or firing up an eight-bit home console to shoot blocky space invaders.
Today, we play games with 3D graphics at 4K resolution on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X - if you can find one - or on your state-of-the-art smartphone. And increasingly, as hardware specs improve and developers build new content, by slipping on a VR headset and entering a 360-degree virtual world.
Games are created for entertainment, whether they use cards, a board, a smartphone, PC, console, or headset. But a funny thing has happened since the world of gaming moved from analogue to digital, from the real world to virtual ones: never before have so many around the globe been connected with each other. To give you a sense of size and scope, here's but one example: since Tencent Games launched PUBG MOBILE in 2018, players have downloaded the game over 1 billion times. That's roughly one out of every 7.7 people on the planet downloading and playing a single video game with each other on their mobile phones.
Steven Ma, Tencent
And daily, some 50 million players from dozens of countries, including the UK, US, Brazil and more team up in PUBG MOBILE to accomplish their mission. So, it occurs to me, as the head of Tencent Games - the world's largest games platform company by many measures - that it's time for game developers to accomplish ours.
We could savour the popularity of our many great games and the revenue
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