live your games now
live your games now
what was a welcome distraction a few years ago, is now serious business. so much so that there are large five-day conferences to celebrate video games and create buzz around upcoming titles and devices.
there are a few big names in gaming that most have heard of:
- XBox (Microsoft)
- PlayStation (Sony)
- Nintendo
these companies mostly focus on consoles. but now things have changed. phones are where all the games are being played. so much so that gaming revenue from mobile devices in 2021 was ~$91 billion, nearly twice that from consoles, with PCs further behind.
but technology companies haven’t stopped at mobiles. they’re thinking about what comes next already. and they have good reason to believe it is VR.
VR is where it's at
Facebook, for one, is all in on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). It has nearly a fifth of all its employees working on such projects. its $299 Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets are a hit. it also recently bought gaming studio BigBox VR which makes Population: One, also called the Fortnite of VR. in fact, Facebook will launch a VR wristband controlled by your brain to separate itself from the crowd.
Apple won’t stop here. it is building a cloud gaming service, Apple Arcade, which it is now expanding. if Apple is at it, so is Google. Google, too, is trying its hand at cloud gaming. it won’t develop its own titles but wants to be the one host for them all.
Amazon isn’t far behind either. the e-commerce giant announced it will open Luna, its cloud gaming platform, to all its Prime users next week.
get active
the future looks very interesting even if you’re not a gamer. the time for passive entertainment like watching films is passing. the big technology companies are looking at the data and that’s why the change. people spend about 3.2 hours a day watching streaming services. but when people game, they’re at it for an average of eight hours a week. seems low but reports suggest that it is changing. some age groups spend six hours a day. once Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that sleep is his company’s biggest competitor. now, it is Fortnite.