Without a doubt, 2023 was a transformative year in gaming. Microsoft overcame significant regulatory hurdles to acquire Activision Blizzard. Netflix launched its cloud gaming service. NFTs matured from a trend to an established technology that is redefining commerce in gaming.
As the year winds down, Bartosz Skwarczek, CEO of G2A Capital Group and founder of G2A.com, the world’s largest marketplace for digital entertainment, looks at what the future holds for gaming in 2024.
Will games become safer and more accessible to players worldwide? What will happen to gamers as tech giants snap up gaming companies in the competition for content?
G2A has been paying close attention to how changes in the industry affect its 25 million users across the globe. Here are the five trends Skwarczek says to watch as we enter 2024 — and why they matter for gamers and gaming companies alike.
1. Microsoft/Activision Blizzard was just the beginning.
Our industry hasn’t seen a merger at the scale of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in a long time. This is the beginning of a wave of consolidations and acquisitions: US Big Tech is sitting on a pile of cash, fighting for content and looking for targets.
Now that Microsoft has proven that regulatory hurdles can be overcome, we will see more big tech companies to follow as the race for content heats up (my bet is EA being the next big acquisition target is just a matter of time).
What does this mean for gamers? Activision Blizzard’s games will inevitably end up on Game Pass at some point, and Game Pass will gain some popularity. Microsoft also seems to be open to new forms of distribution and monetization — look at the recent release of Diablo 4 on Steam — so hopefully this means games become more accessible to a wider audience. This ties in with the mission G2A.COM has set out for itself – to democratize access to digital entertainment. Seeing this approach taken up by other companies is reassuring.
Ultimately, we should expect the PC market to start looking more like the console market: a small number of major players will control the marketplace, deciding which games will be released and where. Time will tell whether this is good or bad for the gaming community.
2. NFTs aren’t dead.
The market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has collapsed from its peak in August 2021. Today, 95% of NFTs have a market cap of 0 ether.
Does this mean the NFT market is dead? This is a sign that the market is settling down. Now that speculators have lost interest, NFTs are becoming a useful technology for artists, collectors, and gamers.
As a counterfeit-proof certificate of authenticity, NFTs offer a range of possibilities in gaming. They can be used to build in-game economies and marketplaces — think World of Warcraft — and give developers a new avenue for funding projects. NFTs could even make the gaming logistics chain more trustworthy by using NFTs to represent goods, stored in crypto wallets and managed on a blockchain that functions as a single source of truth. More seamless UX is still needed.
S&P Global Intelligence reports that in-game NFTs made up 3.64% of in-game purchases at the end of 2022, representing $3.64 billion in revenue. This certainly resonates with me: we recently launched G2A Geekverse, a marketplace dedicated to Web3 gaming, to cater to gamers who have flocked to titles like Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, and Gods Unchained.
S&P predicts that the in-game NFT market will grow to $15.46 billion — but this growth will only be possible if game companies remember that NFT is a technology, not a product in itself. NFTs need to offer real value to users and creators, whether that’s in the form of enhanced engagement, greater ownership, or monetary gain.
3. Cloud gaming isn’t a guaranteed success.
Netflix just launched its cloud gaming service in the U.S., the latest vote of confidence in the future of streaming-based games.
G2A.COM was founded 13 years ago in response to the limitations of boxed distribution, so naturally, it’s exciting to see the industry doubling down on cloud games. Ultimately, making games available via streaming will broaden access to many users by removing the need for high-end machines and making new releases immediately available.
But many giants have already fallen trying to conquer this field, and the issues they faced remain. Many regions around the world still lack access to a lag-free internet connection. Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index shows how much broadband and mobile speeds differ between countries: for example, average broadband speeds in Singapore are more than four thousand percent faster than in Burundi.
Gamers in regions with disadvantaged connectivity won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of cloud gaming. We only need to look at Sony’s PlayStation Plus to see how technical limitations can impede growth: the service is still not available in most countries around the world, and Sony recently stopped disclosing subscriber numbers (after losing 1.9 million users in 2022).
Without a strong user base, a streaming service can quickly fall into a catch-22 like the one that doomed Google Stadia. As Stadia product manager Dov Zimring described it in a document provided to the FTC during the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard court battle, gamers didn’t subscribe to Stadia due to a lack of content, and developers didn’t create games for Stadia due to a lack of users. Netflix and other players will need to figure out how to build a strong ecosystem of gamers and content to survive in a fragmented landscape with a limited addressable market.
4. Cybersecurity is more important than ever.
Cloud-based gaming heightens a familiar challenge for game companies: keeping players safe from illegal activity. Fraud attempts have always been one of the most important challenges to address in gaming, and the shift from console to cloud creates more opportunities for bad actors to exploit gamers and developers.
Game companies face a wide variety of cyber threats, from fraudulent transactions to outright hacking. TransUnion reports that video gaming is second only to retail when it comes to being targeted by digital fraudsters: an estimated 7% of all transactions are suspected to be fraudulent.
Game companies also face the ever-present threat of phishing, putting user data, intellectual property, and funds at risk. Consider how the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity lost $540 million in crypto when a senior engineer fell for a social engineering scam.
Gamers themselves are also frequently targeted by bad actors. For example, WIRED reports a massive scam that aims to trick Fortnite and Roblox players — often children — into “download apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards.”
Gamers can protect themselves by purchasing digital offerings through trusted marketplaces like G2A.COM. As security is one of our top priorities, our internal cyber defense team constantly improves the existing AI-supported solutions, and external partners provide tools to protect the customer through the entire buying journey. Our comprehensive approach to security allowed us to keep the fraud rate at the level of 0.39%, ten times less than the industry average of 3.6%. However, it’s also on game companies to make gaming as safe as possible for users.
Companies need to establish a security culture, from training employees to stay vigilant for potential attacks to participating actively in the cyber community. Cybersecurity isn’t a one-time investment, either — game companies need to constantly fine-tune their approach to stay ahead of evolving threats.
5. Gaming is becoming more diverse.
For all the popular image that gaming is a hobby for boys and an industry for men, it’s never been quite true. In 2023, the global gaming community expanded to 3.38 billion, marking a 6.3 percent increase from the previous year. The rapidly expanding segment of female gamers now accounts for 49 percent of all the gaming population. This is a huge jump from the numbers we have seen in the 90s, when according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) women comprised about 10-25% of all gamers, depending on the country. Similar growth can be seen in the gaming ecommerce industry – at G2A.COM we have noticed a year-on-year increase in female gamers traffic of as much as 100% and expect to see even more in 2024.
Even despite that shift, many gaming companies are struggling with the topic of diversity – the male/female balance is skewered towards the former: the Game Developer Survey shows that over 70% of gamer creators are men, which grows even more distant the higher up the seniority ladder we go.
This is something that will most likely start to change and will keep changing in the coming years, as it has already been proven by studies like the BCG Innovation and Diversity survey that companies with more diverse groups of employees generate more innovation revenue compared to those with less diversity (26% vs 45%). Since companies naturally evolve towards more profit, increasing diversity seems to be the logical step forward. It can already be seen in some of the industry leaders – at G2A.COM we managed to maintain a nearly 40% female workforce and going against the general trend, this changes up to 50% when we look at the top management, for example.
Women make up almost half of all gamers, want to pay for a quality product and enjoy the gameplay that is not limited to addressing the male imagination. Currently, we can already find many amazingly talented women in game dev with passionate leaders like Debbie Bestwick from Team17 or Kim Swift from Valve being just some of the brightest examples. The next year is looking to be ready for the shift in the gender balance to not only continue but gain momentum.
2023 was a big year for games. 2024 is poised to be even bigger.
2023 is a year that fundamentally reshaped our industry. The increasing push by big tech and media companies into gaming offers to make games even more engaging, accessible, and trustworthy.
