Gaming 30 years from now

Heydrax

Junior Member
Jun 20, 2015
9
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I have seen graphics come a long way. I remember playing Doom II as a kid and then Quake 1, 2, 3 etc...

All the time, I was truly awe-struck when there was an iteration of game series and new games in general.

But the last 5 years has not been too impressive. I think we are now getting ready for a big leap in graphics in the next 15 years. VRAM I think is going to be in the terabytes cause of VR games and...

4k ?? nah, 8k? Possibly

I just want that feeling again. That moment when your jaw just drops cause you see a beautiful vista in a game, or some amazing smoke effect..

Lately the only things that comes close are dynamic shadows, lens flares and vegetation moving as you walk through it. Water effects were so 10 years ago..

Skyboxes are cool too, Bundie did a good job with em for Destiny.

Anyhoo, what are you guys waiting for in the future? Will graphics look like Pixar movies ?

Will Apple suddenly get into the gaming space and create crazy computers for the game enthusiasts ?

I see billions of people playing games. I mean look at this generation already. (THe kids in elementary and high school). They simply are watching Youtube like crazy, minecraft, the guy PewDiePie etc...

Gaming is going to crazy mainstream. Once that generation hits age 30+ we will see incredible advances in tech to satisfy their gaming thirst. I am not that old myself. I am only 30. So 30 years from now, when I am 60, I hope to be amazing.

I just hope we dont fall into a lul cause gaming is all i ever do these days. I cannot be 70 and still rock on the gaming wagon. I will be needing nurses to change my diapers by then.....nah just kidding....but I dont wanna wate 30+ years for the golden age of gaming.


Thoughts? Wishes? Hopes? for the gaming future? Share please
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
81
There's no reason to build that new "future proof" PC.
"Gaming" as we know it will be dead 30 years from now.
 

mmntech

Lifer
Sep 20, 2007
17,504
12
0
Hard to say. Gaming hasn't changed all that much over the last 15 years. The graphics have gotten better and (in some cases) the worlds have gotten bigger. However, core mechanics have mostly stayed the same. There's not much innovation or experimentation. Especially from the mainstream developers.

VR has the potential to be a huge disruption to the industry, but I'm still on the fence regarding its future. Its best suited for first person games, but I can't see it playing nice with all genres. There's also the matter of convenience. VR does have applications outside of gaming though that could give it a boost with the mainstream. I can see live sports being a huge draw.

30 years from now, we'll likely see the death of dedicated hardware in favour of Netflix style streaming services. It's happening already.
 

TeknoBug

Platinum Member
Oct 2, 2013
2,084
31
91
Gaming will be digital only, no media whatsoever and will most likely become rental based (streaming), console gaming will be history since mobile gaming will take over and gaming units will be the size of a USB flash stick that plugs into the TV USB port (or Lightning port if that ever gets standardized) or whatever other port that surfaces, we will stil use a controller or keyboard/mouse, etc.

I don't think glasses or any kind of goggle based gadget will become a standard, not everyone has the eyesight for those.
 

Stringjam

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2011
1,871
33
91
I would like to be excited, but I'm struggling. Graphic fidelity has reached a point where I'm far more concerned with artistic direction than polys. I see demos of ray-traced engines and 3D-scanned photorealistic rendering, and it just doesn't excite me much.

AI algorithms seem to have taken a backseat to VR and Hololens.

Everybody keeps talking about graphics and things like the above to make the environment more immersive, but it's the AI, character development, and good writing that makes the environment alive.
I don't think the future of what I consider to be great games has much to do with advancing technology, but more to do with brilliant execution of the tools we already have.

I mean, think about it. When was the last time you had to make a decision about killing somebody in a game where you actually had to struggle with the decision? Felt remorse afterwards? Faced opposition where the moral compass wasn't so inanely pointed to good or evil that you even had to think?

What about having to make decisions where you're screwed either way, just like we face all the time in the real world?

A lot of gamers don't seem to like that. They want to feel like the badass God of retribution, come to save us all. I'm really getting bored with this cliche.

The real innovation is sitting there waiting to be executed. I think several games have come out recently that have poked at it, but there's so much farther to go. Approaches like this excite me far more than the pixel density of my monitor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Luddite in the slightest. I also don't believe advanced graphic rendering and things like AI and writing are mutually exclusive. If someone comes along and puts it all together in the right balance, I'll be the first one in line.

I do believe the giant, multi-GPU gaming PC, in 30 years, will likely be dead (as well as consoles). At some point, we'll have enough compute power in an IC to handle this stuff. 30 years is a long way out, and there is already disruptive technology on the table.
 
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BSim500

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2013
1,480
216
106
Hardware will have come a long way by then. nVidia will be going strong but you'll need to buy a new GFX card every 6-9 months due to drivers ending optimization support for existing generations. Intel will be going strong and increasing CPU core speed at +4-5% per 2 years, at which point after 30 years Haswell's will have finally doubled in speed. AMD will have been taken over by a new graphics startup called "ATI", who'll be battling Intel with 65,536x ultra weak cores which will allow over 1,000x future heavyweight games to run simultaneously, but still struggle with Starcraft 2...

Mobile devices : Google will have been finally revealed to be a sub-branch of the NSA all along. You will be given a device at birth tagged to your DNA & permanently affixed to your arm, and any attempts to dispose of it or disable the 24/7 active camera & microphone will result in remote electrocution and being "drone swatted". Windows tablets will still be struggling with trying to get "full desktop" and Metro to work properly under Windows 19, whilst Mandarin (Apple renamed after the great Chinese buy-out of 2024) will be as pretentious as ever. In fact, Starbucks and student art galleries won't even let you in without one (unless you've got a goatee and wear sandals).

Desktop PC gaming : 2045 games will still come locked at 30fps for that "cinematic experience" on the next gen PS9 and XB5 consoles. PC's will be unlocked but will stutter along at 30fps with broken input, missing textures (that look exactly like console counterparts) and AI barely above today due to the same obsession with sparkly bits. Gameplay itself will have reached the stage of a single "press X to win" QTE during the intro at which point the rest becomes a passive movie. Kids will be asking their parents & grand-parents (us) what "decent gameplay" means, the same way Justin Bieber fans react with shock at looking at 1960's music video's on Youtube with "They're... they're actually singing. I mean they're making a noise with their own throats live, without autotune!..."

Steam / DRM : Steam will sell the first 10% of every game, whilst the remaining 90% will be sold as 50-120x micro-DLC's as standard for a total cost of $325 per game (inc inflation). All modding will also be 100% paid, with Steam & publisher taking a 95% cut, leaving 5% for the actual modder. Denuvo DRM will have been improved, and involve no less than 8x levels of "on the fly" encryption requiring 75% of all CPU cores used for copy protection leaving 25% for the game. There will be no game saving at all (quick save or checkpoint), however since the length of AAA games will have shrunk to only 45-90mins with infinite health, 1-weapon limits and another 50% reduction in gameplay speed in FPS's as standard, this won't be a problem.

Online : Local storage will be outlawed, and everything must be on the cloud. Even your paperback books & magazines will be required to be kept at the local post office, and they'll mail it to you one page at a time, after which you mail it back. It'll be "so much easier" than the "hassle" of buying a bookcase...

Charts : The top 5 new games in the charts will be : Call of Duty 174, Assassins Creed 137, Tomb Raider 89, GTA 26 and Battlefield 23. The top 5 most played games on Steam however, will still include DOTA2 & Skyrim. The top 5 mobile games will be "Gullible Moron Crush", "Candy Suckers", "Cut Your Wallet Open", "Temple Drop Your Pants" and "Subway Pay Forever You Total Losers" ...

Developers : Bioware will still be churning out "immersive realism centric" RPG's where everyone is a hedonistic sex-starved bisexual with "people issues", whilst Ubisoft will be moving onto the next generation of "tower climbing simulators". EA will be celebrating it's 10,000th "exactly the same sports game as last year" variant. Most developers will die out leaving only publishers, simply because nVidia driver coders already end up writing 3/4 of the game for them anyway and publishers will eventually just hire nVidia directly to write the whole game and cut out the middle-man. Hardware requirements will become 32x Intel or 64x AMD cores, 2TB RAM and 4TB VRAM to create Pac-Man or Pong clones on Unreal Engine 9, and Microsoft will be trying to sell Windows 20 with DirectX 17 for $25pm subscription model, whilst OS usage figures will show 35% still holding out on Windows 7 and 14% on XP.

Did I miss anything?... :biggrin:
 
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werepossum

Elite Member
Jul 10, 2006
29,873
463
126
You are all missing the most import factor of gaming thirty years from now - I'll be dead.

So screw you guys, I'm going home.
 

Zenoth

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2005
5,189
184
106
Well, back in the early 1990s I thought that "games in the future" (say... 10+ years away) would have graphics (for home consoles) that would be just as good as the best arcade games we had at the time. It wasn't too far-fetched and pretty much happened. By 1999 with the Dreamcast (well, 1998 in Japan), "arcade quality graphics" at home was not only achieved but even got better in many cases. In the early 2000s, I thought that games of the future (about the same gap in time, say about 10+ years or so) would of course "look better" (without knowing how better it'd get) but would also mostly be online with a minority staying offline with actual single-player campaign(s). Well, the "better graphics" part was certainly achieved by 2010, but single-player still remained. Although games having some online component or game mode did become more common (and I'm referring to home consoles here, not PC gaming).

And I'd say that about five years ago I already liked to imagine that "in the future" the only significant leap in video gaming evolution (technologically-speaking) would be virtual reality, but not exactly the way it's implemented now with those bulky, usually heavy and uncomfortable head (and eyes) sets. The * true * virtual reality that I have in mind would be nothing less than an Holodeck similar (if not almost identical) to the one shown in the Star Trek franchise (in movies and the TV series). To be honest though I don't think that even in 30 years from now we'll have something like that (more like 100 years+), but I do still believe that the "next big step" in video gaming is virtual reality, one way or another.

The companies doing it (or rather "trying" it) just need to figure out a way (or two) to implement it to make it accessible / affordable enough for most of the market, and find a comfortable method to actually experience it (especially for long play sessions without feeling sick or tiring your neck, or causing eye fatigue). Ironically though, I have the feeling that the better virtual reality becomes (hardware/software wise) the more applications we'll find for it outside of video gaming. Can you imagine a surgeon wearing some kind of compact and light VR device on his head helping him get complete and intricately-detailed and real-time access and 3D view of the organ he's about to intervene on?

But as far as video gaming goes, my reasoning concerning virtual reality (as to why that is specifically the next "big deal" for gaming) is due to the fact that as long as we'll have home consoles then we'll probably never get any other significant PC-exclusive Crysis-styled graphical leaps. And I'm saying this because, really, what else do we have other than graphical leaps for the next big milestone to get to? Well, other than polygons count to make things (scenery, characters, name it...) more "real" or life-like, the only thing I can think of is virtual reality. As I see it (for now anyway) PC gaming will "follow" the progression of console hardware and games (and console generations over the coming decades). There might be a few select exceptions here and there, however, which will bring appreciable improvements in graphics fidelity from time to time, such as Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous for example.

I might of course be wrong, 30 years is a long time... heck it's an eternity when it comes to computing / electronics or just "entertainment technologies" as a whole. We've seen a lot of leaps and improvements since the past 30 years. We can't know for sure what we'll be playing and HOW we'll be playing games in 30 years from now... that is if of course video gaming per se still exists in at least a comparable form as we know it today. It might change so much as to become almost unrecognizable (if compared to our modern video gaming). But I do think, to reiterate, that even though there's still a long ways to go for it that, essentially, VR is the "future" of video gaming.
 
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IGemini

Platinum Member
Nov 5, 2010
2,473
2
81
30 years ago the NES wasn't released yet (in America) and the gaming market was considered virtually dead. I'm not even going to try guessing what'll be happening in another 30 years.
 

Stringjam

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2011
1,871
33
91
Hardware will have come a long way by then. nVidia will be going strong but you'll need to buy a new GFX card every 6-9 months due to drivers ending optimization support for existing generations.

I think nVidia will be in the dust. We're talking 30 years here...Intel will have enough computing power in a single chip to render ray-traced environments at whatever framerate is standard.

There will be no consoles. No gaming PCs. Everybody will have access to cheap, massive computing power.

As I said...the disruptive tech is already on the table. Memristor tech is already well underway. X86 architecture will be considered archaic by them.

Computing power and memory constraints will be a thing of the past. Why do you need a console or a gaming rig when a tiny little box will have exponentially more processing capability than ANYTHING we have now?

The future belongs to the masses. Every class level will have access to it. Everybody will feel entitled to it. 30 years from now, we won't be talking about "hardware."

We have the capability....NOW...to hit 255 Tbps over fiber. What do you think we'll be doing 3 decades from now?

The future? Stream any game, of any quality, instantly. We keep talking about hardware. Everything we know about hardware will be history by then.

It won't be driven by games, though. Like VR, Hololens, and all similar technologies...it will, more than anything else, be driven by pr0n. ;)
 
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nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,816
83
91
I can see the end of the home desktop as we know it in my lifetime, replaced by thin client or roku-like devices attached to screens capable of running the highest-end games.
 

Zodiark1593

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2012
2,230
4
81
30 years ago the NES wasn't released yet (in America) and the gaming market was considered virtually dead. I'm not even going to try guessing what'll be happening in another 30 years.

Here's hoping for a crash in the mobile gaming market. The world would be better off without freemium crapware.
 

Heydrax

Junior Member
Jun 20, 2015
9
0
0
I can see the end of the home desktop as we know it in my lifetime, replaced by thin client or roku-like devices attached to screens capable of running the highest-end games.

:D


With those predictions, your either younger than me..... or around my age/older and overly optimistic. I like optimism dont get me wrong, but I generally always have my hopes high.

I am still waiting for the Singularity to happen (according to futurist Ray Kurzweil) in the next decade or so, who knows.....

Cheers!
 

alcoholbob

Diamond Member
May 24, 2005
6,271
323
126
Hardware improvements are coming at a much slower pace than the early-mid 90s when new manufacturing process was coming online every 12 months. Also even when we do move down a node we are getting diminishing returns due to heat density and leakage. As we've seen from Nvidia and AMD's improvements in architecture, the majority of improvements from the future will be from the software and design side, not from manufacturing advances.

Hell we're still gonna be using B52s in another 30 years. It took us what, 12-13 years from when the first commercial 4K display came out to when 4K60 consumer displays for under $1000 first came out? In 30 years I'm guessing 12K will be the mainstream resolution, but who knows? Might move slower than that, we might still be on 8K. PC resolutions might be higher but will require multiple GPUs. Resolution advances will probably be much, much slower from now on.
 
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mmntech

Lifer
Sep 20, 2007
17,504
12
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Physics disagrees.

PS Now seems to work quite well even with North America's current crappy internet infrastructure. Just depends where the data centres are located. I believe ping times are also much better over fibre-to-home. Ageing copper wire seems to be a big part of the problem right now, but it will likely be replaced entirely by fibre-optics by then.
 

xantub

Senior member
Feb 12, 2014
717
1
46
30 years is too far away, too dependent on unknowns.
15 years from now is a much better time-frame, I do think VR will make a big difference in the short-mid term, and then the social aspects will be added, so imagine a MMO where everybody is playing VR.
There is actually a great book series that covers this exactly, I totally recommend it, the series is "Otherland" by Tad Williams.