What do you think will be the next trendy genre in the games industry?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

We have had:

• Fighting games
• RTS games
• Oldschool MMOs
• Retail WoW clone MMOs
• Shooters
• MOBAs
• Open world games
• Japanese 2D gacha games
• Metroidvanias all across Steam
• Live service shooters or third person action games
• Soulslikes
• Hero shooters
• Battle royales
• Mobile autobattlers
• Chinese 3D open world gacha games

What do you think the next thing will be?

[Oyster Sauce]

More gacha and more Dark Souls, but forever

[Valter]

Okay, Joe from Marketing

[Valter]

Okay okay, hear me out.
X Simulator games, but they're gonna be gachas too

[J1M]

We are clearly moving in the direction of lower input precision and lower input response time and lower input complexity. (Dark Souls, Vampire Survivors, Auto-battlers, etc) Perhaps due in part to the gaming population aging, but mostly a hollow attempt at targeting the "wider audience".

So just apply those things to genres you used to like. That's the future. A world where even when you hear a genre you like has a new game, you won't get excited because it plays like Dark Souls.

[Tangerine]

Competitive Idlers.

[Tweed]

Deckbuilding autobattlers with zombies.

[NotAI]

Marketing is continuing to be the biggest cost. Attention is finite. More people, more of them playing, cost goes to infinity.

So it will be anything easy to stream at low bitrate and still look well-differentiated and appealing, as had been mentioned many times, and is replayable by many different streamers, and has a lot of different bosses, because those character are memorable and easily market the game when people stream themselves beating the same characters. That does not mean boss rush, but anything with such characteristics or better characteristics in the same directions.

This is why Monster Hunter became so popular in recent times. Not just Dark Souls-likes.

It is also another reason why strategy games declined in popularity. There is simply not much room to improve graphical fidelity, art direction, and few ways to make any particular character sufficiently memorable. While other games, like fantasy RPGs had such options.

Then there will be one or two exceptions that have everyone scratching their head why they didn't make that first.

For example, something interesting will probably appear using physics heavily for gameplay that hasn't been done yet by anybody, but it will be using physics for larger and more complex and well distinguishable and memorable bosses fights.

They will be games that don't depend on any reading of popups by players. (Most people now can't read fast, or can't read and comprehend much at all.)

[Cloharp7]

We have had:

• Fighting games
• RTS games
• Oldschool MMOs
• Retail WoW clone MMOs
• Shooters
• MOBAs
• Open world games
• Japanese 2D gacha games
• Metroidvanias all across Steam
• Live service shooters or third person action games
• Soulslikes
• Hero shooters
• Battle royales
• Mobile autobattlers
• Chinese 3D open world gacha games

What do you think the next thing will be?

4x games

Who am I kidding

[dagal]

Pay to win point and click adventures

[J1M]

For a more concrete prediction: there will be something that is barely a game that becomes a big hit that is played via the discord client.

[Decline]

We have had:

• Fighting games
• RTS games
• Oldschool MMOs
• Retail WoW clone MMOs
• Shooters
• MOBAs
• Open world games
• Japanese 2D gacha games
• Metroidvanias all across Steam
• Live service shooters or third person action games
• Soulslikes
• Hero shooters
• Battle royales
• Mobile autobattlers
• Chinese 3D open world gacha games

What do you think the next thing will be?

4x games

Who am I kidding

Not saying they're an industry trend but last couple of years have seem some excellent 4x.

[Tinky Winky]

Remaster
Classic server of old MMO
Unoriginal soulslop
2010s AAA game gacha-fied, also on mobile
Datesim with inbuilt chatbot, featuring gacha and vtuber
Did I mention remaster?

[methoxetamine]

The next trendy genre will be hunting down gachafags in the streets

[Ranselknulf]

Mobile games / Augmented Reality games.

[Tinky Winky]

The next trendy genre will be hunting down gachafags in the streets

Gachafags are essentially pedophiles, so this sounds like a good idea actually.

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd say autobattlers but they're already catching on. It's a shame they're much worse than the kind I'd enjoy, there's a certain level of tactics to properly managing a team and deploying them. Done properly it could be very interesting, managing multiple adventure parties, handling what they find, their cut, tending the wounded, recruiting, so on and so forth.

There's something funny about the sports sims having much deeper sims for management than autobattlers.

[rusty_shackleford]

Okay, Joe from Marketing

Only a few times has a genre just sat there waiting to be iterated upon and made into something. e.g., ASSFAGGOTS(DoTA), Hero Shooters(TF2) were both really the only known titles in what is considered their subgenre now for a while.
I'd have trouble thinking of a game that is rather unique in the same way now. The market is very saturated, both consumers and developers react fast. It was only weeks to go from Vampire Survivors to Steam being flooded with clones of it.

[Bing_xiLim]

Remaster
Classic server of old MMO
Unoriginal soulslop
2010s AAA game gacha-fied, also on mobile
Datesim with inbuilt chatbot, featuring gacha and vtuber
Did I mention remaster?

We're already living in a remaster/remake hell. It seems like the most sensible option going forward as well. Selling nostalgia seems to be one of the defining characteristic of gaming these days.

[Ranselknulf]

The silver lining is that once gaming "evolves", the games we enjoy will no longer be consoomer products for the masses.

There might actually be good niche games again.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Remaster
Classic server of old MMO
Unoriginal soulslop
2010s AAA game gacha-fied, also on mobile
Datesim with inbuilt chatbot, featuring gacha and vtuber
Did I mention remaster?

We're already living in a remaster/remake hell. It seems like the most sensible option going forward as well. Selling nostalgia seems to be one of the defining characteristic of gaming these days.

We are in rerelease hell because the suits took over the industry and choked out the auteurs. Game directors in the West do not have the dictatorial authority like their Asian counterparts to spearhead a vision. Western studios have become democratic design by committee ********. There is no vision behind a lot of these games, and no one wants to put their foot down and say "this is what we are doing, this is what the artstyle is, this is what the gameplay is, etc" whip other people into shape. So these projects languish in development hell for years, and there is no coherent vision behind them. These soulless corporate games fail, which means the suits are stuck with trying to milk the good games that were produced by the very creatives they ousted long ago.

[rusty_shackleford]

because the suits took over the industry and choked out the auteurs.

It's the opposite.

[rusty_shackleford]

It's actually a good thing to have some kind of insulation between the people running the company and the people invested in the products, and publishers tended to be more right than they were wrong.

The decline of turn-based RPGs due to publisher demands? They were entirely right. The market shifted away from PC, and turn-based western RPGs just don't do well on consoles. The older audience willing to give turn-based/strategy games a chance didn't exist yet, the target audience was boys aged 11-17, followed by 18-24, who wanted action.

Now mega-publishers either think(embracer, ubisoft) they won't fail because they're too big, or genuinely are(Microsoft) so we no longer have the same success filter. Ah well, make some slop for the slop pass.

---

I think about this one a lot: Bioware was going to remove flying from Anthem because it was "too hard" to get it right until an EA exec who stopped by to check progress on the game did a playtest and said how much he loved the flying. Bioware then felt like they couldn't remove it and were forced to keep it in… and it ended up being the feature that was the most highly praised by critics & players.

[J1M]

I look at the extensive remastering going on as the industry admitting that older games are better than what several of their teams can make now. Which we will call progress. Have we had a new sequel to a remastered game yet like, say, Tomb Raider 2.5? (ala what happened in the MMO space)

[rusty_shackleford]

I look at the extensive remastering going on as the industry admitting that older games are better than what several of their teams can make now. Which we will call progress. Have we had a new sequel to a remastered game yet like, say, Tomb Raider 2.5? (ala what happened in the MMO space)

The Last of Us got a remaster and remake

[J1M]

I look at the extensive remastering going on as the industry admitting that older games are better than what several of their teams can make now. Which we will call progress. Have we had a new sequel to a remastered game yet like, say, Tomb Raider 2.5? (ala what happened in the MMO space)

The Last of Us got a remaster and remake

I think Siege of Dragonspear would be the closest thing to what I was referring to.

[rusty_shackleford]

I look at the extensive remastering going on as the industry admitting that older games are better than what several of their teams can make now. Which we will call progress. Have we had a new sequel to a remastered game yet like, say, Tomb Raider 2.5? (ala what happened in the MMO space)

The Last of Us got a remaster and remake

I think Siege of Dragonspear would be the closest thing to what I was referring to.

Boomershooters count, sorta. A bunch of them are even done by bigger studios and not much more than just sophisticated doom/quake mods.

[DrSneed]

Might see a couple of horde shooters cause Helldivers 2 did pretty well and so did Space Marine 2.

[Steel-Knight]

I actually wouldn't be surprised if at some point literal "press X to win" games become a trendy thing, where you literally just press one button and are guaranteed to beat the game and can't lose, and then the game has little to no replay value at all.

They might already be a thing actually... it wouldn't surprise me if they are.

[Rumbles]

Might see a couple of horde shooters cause Helldivers 2 did pretty well and so did Space Marine 2.

Horde/extraction shooters are definitely the craze. The now cancelled (thank god) new Titanfall was supposed to be that. Look at all the streamerslop games like Lethal Company which inspired Repo etc... There are also higher scale actual cashgrabs like Delta Force. People like the adrenaline boosts and short bursts of high intensity gameplay with no downside (you don't lose rank like in a MOBA).