Amiqus Me Anything: E3’s big trends

Each month we work with our recruitment partner Amiqus to find the answers to the burning questions of job seekers within the games industry.

Jamie Campbell,
Engineering Service Line Director,
Keywords Studios

I think collaborations are going to be a big thing. Games are continuing to get bigger and better (some things never change!), and the demand for large game teams to dynamically expand is growing. For the past few years that has been a given during production, but we now appreciate that just because a game ships, the challenge isn’t over – games-as-a-service and live-ops mean demand continues far beyond street date, but core teams need to focus on the next title. Leveraging a quality external partner makes a lot of sense!

Graeme Ankers,
Managing Director,
Firesprite

The impacts of Fortnite and PUBG is something we’re going to hear lots about, I would also expect other battle royale games to surface. The wider impact from these developments is where do multiplayer and social innovations go next? The fuse has been lit and it is such an exciting area to work in. I’m sure we will see more on first-party line-ups like Crackdown, The Last of Us Part II and more, along with indie titles like Grip. I’m expecting to see a wave of support for VR including Firesprite’s own PSVR title The Persistence.

Simon Harris,
Executive Producer,
Supermassive Games

This year’s E3 will see a resurgence in a couple of trends – VR and single-player games. I expect both the platform holders and more big publishers to announce new VR titles. Also the first standalone VR headsets have launched, which I think are going to get strong support. The much-heralded death of the single-player game will be proven wrong too. We’ll get our first play of Red Dead Redemption II and I anticipate we’ll see plenty more single-player experiences, especially from Nintendo. Finally, we will see battle royale in everything…

Steve Tagger,
Business Development Director,
nDreams

VR will be all about the growth in interaction, embodiment and storytelling, with so many talented teams pushing the boundaries. The explosion of VR arcades and the thrilling location-based experiences will be unavoidable. Then there’s the huge strides being made in consumer VR from untethered, frictionless headsets to the continuing growth in the home user install base – a consequence of which is games will become longer experiences, with even more interactivity and immersion.

Ian Richardson,
Business Development Director,
Sumo Digital

With the huge successes of games like Fortnite and PUBG, I think we’ll see more games attempt to incorporate similar game modes or strategies to encourage player retention with their franchises. The Nintendo Switch was also a strong performer last year, so definitely keep an eye out for more third-party support in 2018.