I asked the Snow Cannon Games team to come with their predictions for 2016 and boy did they deliver! Below are a few of the topics we think are going to be hot topics for the games industry in 2016.
Watch out for China!
James Portnow believes the big question is the continuous Chinese acquisition of non-Chinese game companies. There have been some big success for them, but also some major failures. We’ll see how hands off Tencent remains with Riot after the 100% acquisition.
“Up until this point there’s been an almost blind rush for Chinese companies to acquire Western developers. I think this year will see the natural coalescing of a more clear strategy to how this goes about”.
– James Portnow, Interim Design Director
What that strategy eventually becomes is unclear but it will determine both the amount of Chinese capital 
available in the future and the amount of control Chinese parent companies expect to have over their acquisitions.
Lastly, he thinks China has another potential major sea change for the games industry waiting in the wing. For years China has had an enormous internal development market, and we’ve seen this market effect the rest of the world (many mobile free to play cues have been taken from it) but with the recent lift of the console ban in China comes the question of whether China will aggressively enter the console development market from the software side.
“Watch for the announcement of Chinese console studios this year and look to see if Chinese console products start to see release. If so, it will be a shot in the arm to the console industry and open up the question of whether Chinese games will stay locked within China or if efforts will be made to localize them and export them to the world, bringing an interesting new cultural perspective to the world of console gaming.”
– James Portnow, Interim Design Director
More Star Wars and boutique games
“Space is the new black”, according to our Executive Producer Demetri Detsaridis. With the mainstream media landscape currently dominated by all things Star Wars and new SW features due out on a yearly schedule, it stands to reason that space combat will have some fairly significant exposure in the coming year.
“Add to this the slightly higher-brow (but still mainstream) success of The Martian, wider releases of high
profile projects like Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen and the debut of indie hype monster No Man’s Sky and space is starting to look like a setting with multi-genre potential and sci-fi may even spend a year or two edging out fantasy as the generic milieu of choice for mobile titles with mass-market aspirations. Gameplay-wise, this could mean a lot of different things, but I would be surprised not to see at least a few starfighter games, exploration-based adventures and survival-horror titles amongst the 2016 “Best New” lists.”
– Demetri Detsaridis, Executive Producer
Executive Producer, Geoffrey Zatkin, thinks we’re going to see the rise of boutique games or games that appeal to a small but loyal group of enthusiasts.
“If you can keep the development budget reasonable, you can make a fine living making games
for a smaller community that caters to exactly what that community wants to play. The hardest thing for these games will be finding their audience – letting the people they’re making the game for know that the game exists.”
– Geoffrey Zatkin, Executive Producer
We all believe that discoverability will continue to be a problem for many amazing games and that we’re going to see some changes in that regard in 2016. Chief Marketing Officer, Emmy Jonassen, has some interesting thoughts on how this is going to influence advertising sales.
“As platforms give indies access to more and more traffic source analytics, including which traffic sources convert to sales best, I think we’ll see a power shift in
who is receiving the majority of indies’ advertising dollars. Specifically, gaming sites that offer great exposure, but only traditional display advertising options (e.g., banner ads, takeovers, etc.) are going to start dramatically losing share of wallet in favor of companies that can offer more engaging methods with measurable results.”
– Emmy Jonassen, Chief Marketing Officer
We all agree that the gaming PC is here to stay!
The most significant trend that Detsaridis sees for the industry in 2016 is the renewed focus on the PC as a primary platform. Between the incredible success of PC eSports, the continued expansion of Steam’s library and userbase and the introduction of two major PC-based VR headsets in 2016 (Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) it is clear that we can finally stop writing “Death of the PC” articles in gaming magazines.
“Steam is effectively the “App Store” that PC gaming needed, and its ubiquity combined with the overall PC
market’s tolerance for much-higher-than-mobile pricing has made it a natural home for AAA developers in genres that work well with a mouse and keyboard (especially those based in lower-overhead countries, like CD Projekt Red, 4A and Wargaming) as well as for more niche genres that had too small an audience to make console development financially feasible (like adventure games, hardcore flight sims and turn-based wargames).”
– Demetri Detsaridis, Executive Producer
These types of games have been available on the PC all along, but the combination of Steam and F2P monetization techniques have drastically increased the availability of these titles to their potential audience and — crucially — the visibility of the market size to game industry financiers. More than one major publisher has a larger slate of PC games coming in 2016 than they’ve released since the 1990s and that doesn’t even count the major industry players who have invested in new PC developers that have yet to announce their titles.
“All told, 2016 is likely to be a banner year for PC and, with any luck, will be the year we stopped imagining these platforms as in competition with one another…given that they’ve been proven to be complementary many times over by industry data.”
– Demetri Detsaridis, Executive Producer
The Steam Machines
We all believe that the Steam Machines will be interesting in some way in 2016. James Portnow believes that the portable steam machine will be an interesting new market for game developers to get involved with.
“I’ve long struggled to see a market opening for the steam machine, but here’s a place that makes perfect sense, and will allow smaller developers to finally break into the handheld market without sacrificing the ability to develop for the PC.”
– James Portnow, Interim Design Director
All in all we predict a good year for smart game developers. Zatkin believes we’re also in an acquisition phase of the main industry (this is cyclical) – lots of studios are being bought, and people funding studios are investing less on potential and more on a tangible prototypes.
“This means that it is harder right now to start a new studio as it is harder to get money to start the studio. This also means that, a few years from now, all of the people in the studios being acquired will start to get itchy feet and think of forming new companies. If this aligns with an investable phase of the market (i.e people with money to invest in new companies), we’ll see a lot of new companies formed, and lots of new and creative things coming to market. The exception to this is the VR market, which is in that phase right now (lots of new investments and studios).” – Geoffrey Zatkin
And with that we wish you a Happy 2016!