My Insights from Gamesbeat 2024

I am excited to share my insights from the highly informative Games Beat Conference event, where I attended insightful panel discussions and led an AI roundtable. These are the trends I foresee shaping our industry in the near and distant future.

1. layoffs are set to continue, potentially further reshaping the gaming industry. While major game companies are expected to slow down on layoffs after July, studios that secured funding a few years ago and are now seeking additional funding support may face significant challenges. This could lead to a reduction in staff, game scope, or even studio closures. 

2. Salaries for mid-level talent will start to flatten out and fall from highs during 2022. Even with all the layoffs happening this year and last, the market is still competitive in terms of finding great talent, and the salaries for mid-level talent are still, in my opinion, high. Still, I see them flattening out and some disciplines beginning to fall. This is good for our industry. Salary during 2021 and 2022 increased by almost 40% for mid-level talent. This puts tremendous pressure and risk on building games.

You will still have to pay in the top 70% of the salary band for hard-to-find roles. Those salaries will likely remain the same in the short term. There is still demand for those hard-to-find skills in our industry.

3. The upcoming Fall/Winter season, a crucial period for publishers, holds promise, with several highly anticipated games set to launch. This strategic timing allows them to establish a foothold before the release of GTA 6 next year. As a result, the games industry is projected to experience a favorable revenue year in 2024.

4.   We may see a few blockchain games that will find a decent-sized audience next year. Some blockchain games may attract gamers because they are fun, engaging, and different. They don’t have the predatory nature of previous blockchain games and are based on ethical monetization.

5. Looking ahead to 2025, the highly anticipated launch of GTA 6 will dominate the market, and more money will be available to independent studios. Publishers will begin to realize that they don’t have enough in the pipeline to support 2027 and beyond releases. More money will be available for indie developers to build their games from both the investment community and publishers. Publishers will begin to hire again, but nothing close to the pace during the Pandemic.

More consolidation will occur in our industry as Publishers seek to acquire new IP and talent.

6. This leads into 2026, a significant year in gaming. Many games will be launched in the first and second quarters of 2026, so there will be some breathing room after GTA 6 dominates the market in 2025. 

7. AI will continue to become an essential tool for content creators. AI has been used in games for a long time. It is nothing new. The difference is how AI will be used in game development. Today, the large language models developed in Open AI have provided powerful tools in the past few years. AI will allow developers to build more content faster in their games.

Game developers are starting to use AI to generate concepts by allowing creators to quickly iterate their design ideas visually. You create hundreds of scenarios to find the right image matching the design. You will see both non-real-time and real-time AI in games. Non-real-time AI will be used in asset generation (audio, cinematics, animation, art creation), and real-time AI will be used in the procedural generation of the world and deep NPC interactions, making the game more repayable, immersive, and alive. AI will help eliminate time-consuming, monotonous tasks that developers used to do, like seamlessly blending transitions in terrain, pathfinding, LODs, animations, creating props, etc.

I don’t see AI taking away jobs in our industry, but those who understand how to use it will run circles around those who are not proficient in it.

8. MMOs will return in popularity. A new form of MMO that requires less time investment and is more focused on short-play experiences built for small teams of people to enjoy will become available. Business models will be less about free-to-play and more about paying for the game and the ability for players to purchase in-game items. Even a monthly subscription may come back.

9. Many developers will adopt UGC in their single-player and multiplayer games. AI will continue to help make content generation easier, enabling players to provide better user-generated experiences. The next generation of gamers already understands UGC since they grew up playing with Minecraft or Roblox. It is like the logical next step.

I will caveat this by saying that most UGC content is terrible, with only about 2% rising to the top. However, with an entire generation trained on it and next-generation AI toolsets, we may see a higher percentage rise to the top.

10. UGC marketplaces could become the next publishing platform for content creators. Indie game developers are already starting to build content and sell games on these platforms. A significant restriction is that you are confined to their framework, such as UEFN.   As the tools/engines become less restrictive, more game developers (especially Indie developers) will develop for these platforms, and the next break-out hit could come from these marketplaces.