The Future of Games, Apps & Social Media

Several important trends will greatly affect these sectors over the long-term.

a. Alexa and Similar Digital Assistants: Extremely rapid growth in the popularity of Amazon’s Alexa and similar digital assistant technologies means that more and more consumers will be utilizing voice commands to Alexa, Siri or similarly equipped devices to post to social media, launch apps and take other routine actions. Wearable devices, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban sunglasses with an embedded digital assistant/camera, will boost the popularity of live-streaming and in-the-moment sharing.

b. Privacy and Security: U.S. state and federal regulators are rigorously pursuing tightened privacy rules and their enforcement, and eventually may take greater federal responsibility for ensuring digital transaction and identity security. All of this will create new challenges to social media and other shared platforms. China has been maintaining tight restrictions on online sharing and gaming platforms as well. Meanwhile, the EU has enacted daunting regulation of online advertising, search and sharing platforms, and EU regulators have been quick to enforce these regulations with massive fines. Other nations are following in the EU’s footsteps in this regard. Among other things, this means that social media and software platforms can no longer take consumers for granted in terms of permission to use and share personal data.

c. Security for Apps: Mobile apps present a security problem of their own, as they have been known to be used as a way to infect mobile devices with malware and viruses—particularly if the app is downloaded outside of such platforms as the Apple Store or Google Apps. This problem will accelerate over the mid-term. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) by hackers, phishers and fraudsters will intensify these threats.

d. Faster Wireless: The recent implementation of extremely fast wireless access, known as 5G (and, over the long-term 6G), will enable games, apps and social media sites to provide much richer, more interactive features that will load and operate at blazing speed.

e. Electronic Games as Recognized Sports: Top electronic game players are evolving into media stars. They can now compete in leagues, in streaming media and in live, auditorium events. This trend is likely to accelerate. The potential of eSports as an advertising and PR vehicle will quickly be expanded by marketers. On a lower level, groups of universities and even high schools will have electronic games teams that compete against each other. The fact that massive, global generations of digital natives now exist, people who began playing electronic games at a very early age and have been engaged in them for decades, will fuel this trend. The potential is massive, and the growth will be stunning.

f. Artificial Intelligence: AI will play a rapidly growing role in enhancing the usefulness of social media and the options and features available in games. Generative AI tools, such as DALL-E and ChatGPT are rapidly being adopted by game and app designers as a way to develop new looks, colors, layouts and features in an efficient and innovative manner. Generative AI has rapidly proven its ability to create virtual worlds, write text and design virtual characters, leading the way to highly automated game development that requires much less human creative input and editing.

g. Personal Computers (PCs): PC operating systems and user interfaces are becoming more reliant on apps, changing the PC/laptop/tablet to a more smartphone-like experience.

h. The Metaverse & Virtual Reality (VR): Immersive experiences, enhanced by VR viewing equipment, will expand in gaming and social media. Meta (parent company to Facebook) plans to be a leader in this field. At the same time, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence capabilities (including its collaboration with OpenAI), its cloud computing platform Azure, its business enterprise tools and its video gaming products all have massive potential to work together with Microsoft’s HoloLens product to create highly innovative services and add-on tools aimed at business and industry.

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