Top Gaming Trends of 2022 & 2023

Consumers report that photo anxiety increasingly interferes with many memorable events since people are constantly wondering if they should be taking a picture rather than enjoying the experience. But as cameras and wearables get more common, it will be more and more practical to just record everything and then go back and select the best moments after the fact.

Part of the issue is that it's hard to snap a photo at the perfect second. A recent change in how iPhones take pictures solves some of this: the photo is actually a 3-second video (with the 3-second window starting just before the button press), so it's possible to go back frame-by-frame and capture the perfect moment. This idea is now extending to online games, where a new service, Gif Your Game, lets players convert perfectly-timed gameplay videos into easily shareable GIFs that they can then post on Discord, Reddit, and Twitter.

Sharable snippets have been an increasingly important driver of cultural awareness in the last few years; an apt reaction GIFs play the same kind of linguistic role today that a well-chosen Bible verse might have played in the 19th century. And media companies know that GIFs are a powerful marketing tool, a low-cost means of raising awareness, and of promoting peer endorsement.

For games, traditional GIF generation was challenging, because recording the screen could introduce performance issues during gameplay. Gif Your Game uses a different approach: it's really recording the changes in game state, not the video itself, which means that there isn't a performance hit and also that the replay can be viewed from different angles. The product can be configured to automatically record specific in-game events, so someone playing a first-person shooter can know that there will be a video of every kill, or a sports gamer will know that they can review every goal.

This doesn’t just improve performance for computer hardware, but for the gamer, too; they want to be thinking about playing the game, not about whether they should be recording. It’s a tool for gamers to never lose their best moments.

This is especially interesting because anxiety about when to enjoy the moment and when to start recording is common in the real world, too; ironically, the digital world is coming up with solutions for living in the moment faster than the analog world can. While recording everything then going back for what you want is currently restricted to gaming, cheaper cameras, storage, and connectivity mean that it will spread to other parts of life, too.

Many online media sites put substantial effort into optimizing their sharing process. For example, when a TikTok video is being viewed in a browser, ⌘-L, the hotkey for selecting the URL, gets hijacked to show a sharing dialogue instead, with prompts to post the link to various social media sites. Sharing is especially important in gaming since so many games are multiplayer; sharing a gameplay GIF is practically inviting someone to buy the game and try it out themselves.

Many image- or GIF-creating sites add a watermark to raise brand awareness, but Gif Your Game does not. Instead, the service operates on the assumption that there's wide awareness of its brand in the gamer community, and that if anyone asks how the video was recorded, someone else will chime in and say it was through Gif Your Game. This is much more organic than merely including the watermark; it’s a peer endorsement, rather than an ad.

Gaming earbuds represent the divergence of two separate trends: some people game to relax, and some people game to win.

Sites like Twitch have made it possible for gamers to earn a full-time living by playing video games and chatting with their audience. While some of these players are skilled, their role is not just to demonstrate elite gameplay; it's also to keep the audience engaged and entertained, whether or not the game itself is interesting. For these players, an important part of their work is their physical appearance, and they often opt for gaming earbuds, as opposed to more bulky over-ear headphones, as a way to look better while staying engaged with the game.

This also affects more than just professional streamers, as gaming is increasingly used as a way to socialize and how you look when you socialize—even when gaming—is sometimes important to gamers. Consumers even say they favor earbuds to over-ear headphones when going on pandemic Zoom dates, as they report the over-ear variety can look bulky and distracting.

Earbuds are a category that has rapidly grown in popularity in the last few years, and as demand rises, there’s often pull from the market to offer niche-focused variants. In addition to gaming earbuds, there are earbuds designed for swimming, earbuds for sleep, even earbuds designed for pets. Since each of these products is optimized for one specific use case, it’s often suboptimal for others—a great set of noise-cancelling earbuds, for example, is dangerous while driving. Meanwhile, this same proliferation makes users more sensitive to price and features; no one wants to overpay for elements that don't benefit them, and gamers in particular are sensitive to the "gamer tax"—the fact that some high-performance products have a higher price point when targeting gamers.

If there's a large skill gap between trained and untrained players, it can be demotivating to get an accurate assessment of one's play. So Leetify, which tracks players' actions automatically and summarizes them after games, uses a different kind of metric: it calculates players' relative abilities, showing where they're stronger or weaker. In other words, Leetify tells players that someone who is as good as they are at aiming should be much better at dodging. This is a way to simultaneously provide both guidance and encouragement and, in some cases, is an alternative to a leaderboard. If you’re 99th percentile at one thing, Leetify implies, there’s no reason you can’t work up to being 99th percentile at everything. Since people develop unevenly, Leetify is always giving users something new to work on.

The rise of competitive gaming, more broadly, has created a two-tiered gaming culture. Some players just want to relax and have a good time, while others want to excel competitively. As games get more challenging, and players refine their techniques, it gets harder and harder to leave the first group and join the second.

Even for casual players, the required skill level is rising. Gen Y treats video games the way an older generation treated golf: as a way to socialize while also competing. This has led to a profusion of companies that offer training and analytics to help players build up their skills. Leetify is popular in this space, focusing on improving players' skills in a specific version of Counterstrike. Counterstrike is one game of many, and far less popular than games like Fortnite, indicating that this is a large market with room for more participants.