PC hardware – once it was cheap. 2022 in games industry - our predictions

• 2022 in Games Industry - Our Predictions
• A year without major releases from Electronic Arts, Avatar being the dark horse of Ubisoft?
• RED Cyberpunk (not dead) Redemption
• PC hardware – once it was cheap
• Changing conditions in gavedev?

PC hardware – once it was cheap

The year 2022 will be another unfavorable period for upgrading your PCs or seeing shelves full of next-gen consoles in the store. Analysts predict that the lack of chips and capacity in factories will still be taking its toll. This will again translate into notorious shortages of electronics in stores, especially GPUs and the recently absurdly expensive DDR5 memory chips.

Regardless of the shortages on the market, the times of cheap hardware are unlikely to come back. An interesting example is the announcement of the latest Nvidia card from the weakest xx50 series. The suggested retail price of the new RTX 3050 is $249, while in 2019, the cheapest GTX 1650 was priced at $149, so it's a 60% increase. Such a price is probably dictated not only by new standards and technologies, but also by favorable circumstances for greater profits. We can probably forget about the cheapest cards with MSRP below $250, although in reality, even the price of $250-300 for the weakest RTX is a pipe dream of many players, due to the constant impact of scalpers and cryptocurrency miners.

Problems with availability and prices of gaming hardware can be solved by streaming services integrated with TV sets. Source: LG

Cloud streaming – ultra details on potato PC

Problems with obtaining new equipment will probably reinforce the importance of streaming platforms and cloud gaming. The year 2022 may be a period of a great boom for this kind of experience due to the introduction of game streaming services to the most popular TVs. So far, buying a new TV is not a huge problem. In models from recent years, 4K resolution, HDR and good refreshment are mostly standard, and now, it is also possible to launch games with the remote control – without even connecting the console or the PC.

Samsung and LG have already announced their support – their TV sets will receive Google Stadia and GeForce Now services. Sony will probably not lag behind and after the aforementioned merge of PS Now subscriptions with PS Plus, streaming support ought to appear in Bravia TVs. The question is, whether Nvidia and Google services will appear simultaneously.

Cloud gaming, of course, is not a perfect solution and has many disadvantages. It requires a very fast internet bandwidth, and in the event of any network problems, even temporary, the gameplay will be prone to glitching and lagging. Large publishers do not offer the latest games immediately in streaming as well, only after some time. All this, however, doesn't seem so bothersome if we compare the disadvantages of streaming with the unavailability and high prices of new consoles and PCs. Playing in the cloud in 2022 will be by far the cheapest and most convenient way to play many games literally everywhere – if not on a new TV, then on an office laptop or even a smartphone.

The NFT is just getting started

NFT, despite controversy, appears in more and more titles.

Whether we like it or not, NFT in computer games is warming up and will probably come to many more titles over time – just like microtransactions did. Developers, especially large publishers, will not miss out on the chance to earn extra money, even if only a handful of people are interested in the beginning. For now, you can still see a certain shyness of developers, still exploring the new territory, probing the market and seeing how far they can push it. Some yield under pressure of criticism (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2), others eagerly join the first NFT pioneers (Ubisoft, Konami, and CDPR, who introduced the Cyberpunk 2077 watch). The latter will probably be followed by others, regardless of the voices of discontent.