Where do you think gaming is going?

[Madame Adequate]

It's mostly disappearing into two distinct camps: Business bulltrout that puts out the same game year on year and makes smurfloads of money anyway, and disappearing up its own asshole as pretentious indie bulltrout continues to be the only alternative anyone seems to be able to come up with.

Almost everyone has trying or is trying some sort of gimmick like motion controls and they're almost all going to fall through or be one-shots that can't be relied on in the long term.

The last gasp of gaming will be Gaben making his Gabenbox, and it will be Good, and he will make his Gabenbox 2, and it will be better, and that'll be the end of that. After that gaming's gonna have to either limp along being boring and derivative as hell or it's going to have to crash, implode, and start again like we saw in the 80s.

There will actually be some good games in there of course, this actually looks like a strong year for space 4xes for example, but ehhhh. Where are the Morrowinds, the Warcraft IIIs, the Red Alerts, the Fables... okay maybe not the Fables. The thing Fable was promised to be when it was called Project Ego.

[Del Murder]

I think the shift in focus towards cell phone and social media games is real and will last a while. I think cell phone processing power will only get better and they will eventually replace dedicated handheld systems as the leader in on-the-go gaming (if they haven't already). Handhelds will survive as a niche market and forgotten genres like JRPGs will still find a home on them, but the 3DS and Vita won't have nearly the library that the DS, GBA, or even PSP had.

PC gaming will continue to rise as your computer and your television become more and more integrated. There will still be a market for dedicated consoles, but the next PS or XBox will have less users than the PS3 or 360 had. The next versions of these systems will only be hardware upgrades and the differences will not be as noticeable from this generation as they were from the prior generation (diminishing returns). The major difference will be the way games are delivered, with much more games being downloaded rather than read from a disc. Eventually (maybe not the next generation), there will be no more discs.

Nintendo will continue to be in its own league and will continue to push the envelope on ways to change how people play games. The Wii U will actually end up being a pretty good system but won't be as popular as the alternatives due to the hardware inferiority it will have to the next Sony and Microsoft systems. The Wii U controller will eventually get a redesign but that won't help it be useful for third party games. Nintendo's first party games will make good use of it, especially the Zelda game.

Games themselves will still be focused on sequels and spinoffs for a while, but consumers and developers will eventually get sick of that and we may enter either a) a lull period where no one tries or b) a gaming renaissance. DLC will still be used more and more but the 'day 1 DLC' days or the days of DLC that clearly was intended to be part of the original experience will probably end.

[black orb]

>>> Tablets will smurf handhelds consoles..

Other than that, I cant fathom any other important changes.