[This content was created in association with Perforce]
The last decade has seen immense change in the way developers create games. With the industry embracing new development philosophies and a data/consumer centric outlook, along with new tools plus a more distributed outlook to how assets are created.
Looking ahead to the next ten years, a recent survey of 500 game developers by Perforce, helps us to see where the biggest areas for change are likely to fall over the next ten years.
Development teams have already seen more change in the last few months as they might see in a decade usually. The ‘new normal’ will undoubtedly feature more remote working, but respondents were concerned about moving around the large files needed for game development, as well as finding and identifying the correct files over remote connections.
As one survey taker put it, they need to look at: “Building infrastructure, investigating products, looking at multi-location of servers, and distributed builds in the cloud.”
“We believe cross-platform gaming will become an expected standard in the game development industry.”
On a similar vein, increased work across geographies and time zones was a key prediction, by 63 percent of respondents. Tied to that, were developers seeing the need to share and reuse more assets and files and to expand partnerships with others. Or as another survey taker said, “Different studios with different strengths working as team units on the same game.”
Streaming platforms are set to see the biggest growth over that period, the respondents thought. More so than mobile, while console looks unlikely to be the biggest winner (42, 33, and 17 per cent respectively). That said, the platform of choice could become less relevant, with developers noting that cross-platform gaming is a key area for the future.
“We believe cross-platform gaming will become an expected standard in the game development industry. We as developers need to break the barrier at limiting people from interacting based on a platform. If we have all the tools and resources, we should have no excuse to not deliver,” said one respondent.
Other key areas identified by respondents for growth were AR/VR’s continued rise as technology improves and experience with the new formats grow. Unreal Engine 5 was also noted as a key technology, and 5G’s greater bandwidth and improved latency will be a huge driver in the mobile sector.
Find out more by reading The State of Game Development Report.
