Seeing cheaper prices on these Dreamcast enthusiast made VM2 things would be pretty nice.

Games will be integrating AI (LLM or similar) in a big way. At first, it'll suck and be intrusive and everyone will hate it.

Then—as the amount of VRAM creeps upwards in the average GPU—it'll reach a threshold where it can be good and then some game will come out that everyone loves. It'll use (local) AI in a great way and the game wouldn't be the same without it.

15 years from now:

The desktop computer will be still there, same thing as before. Console market share will decrease, but they'll be still there. Smartphone games will become increasingly more complex, and some games will be made with phone joysticks in mind.

A bunch of new input methods will be released; they'll be seen as gimmicks, most will fade away. One or two will stick for longer.

There'll be a bigger crash than in 1983, and a lot of AAA studios will fill bankruptcy. It'll be like a forest fire - as it burns down the old and big trees, it leaves space for smaller plants to thrive.

You'll at least one game featuring a multiplayer version of any given current single-player genre. Multiplayer Vampire bullet heaven, multiplayer colony simulator, multiplayer dating sim...

Speaking on bullet heaven (I mean things like Vampire Survivors), you'll see elements of the genre creeping into other genres. Much like RPGs did in the past.

Nethack version 3.8.4 will be released. It'll have changes like

• fixed exploit where players would #name a corpse Vladsbane and use it to kill Vlad, then use the output message to know if the corpse was fresh or tainted.
• fixed critical bug: if you #wish for a statue of the fourth rider and cast stone to flesh on it, hitting it with a rubber chicken used to end your run. Now it correctly reverts the rider back into a statue.

LLM presence in games will be subtle. For example, irrelevant NPCs might say things generated by a LLM, instead of pre-scripted ones. This won't become the standard because they tend to output hallucinations that confuse players (e.g. refer to some item that doesn't exist), but some games will make good use of it.

"Evolving" enemies on the other hand will be the next big hit. They won't use any current AI model, but they'll run local (and way simpler) neural networks. For example, if you kill lots of enemies by luring them into a pit, you might notice newer enemies avoiding to hang around pits.

VR with IRL walkable environments, once affordable could become a big thing in the future. If they invented or made a system that was small enough to put into the average bedroom and made it affordable, sweaty pubs would become a literal thing and gamers could become quite ripped. I do think that it would also provide an advantage in shooter games by simultaneously increasing the floor and the ceiling as aiming IRL has, at least in my experience, been much easier than with a mouse or controller.

The next leap forward in gaming would be brain to computer interfaces (BCI). Instead of sending signals from the brain to our limbs to our devices, one neural pathway would be cut out entirely. Of course that depends on the latency of the BCI but if that can be lowered to be faster than our nerves, it could be a dimensional shift in how we experience computers and gaming.

Of course, the Black Mirror always looms and those animes of people getting stuck in games and dying IRL could actually happen. There was also a movie with Bruce Willis, but probably inspired by an anime or a book, of people using surrogates (maybe the movie is called Surrogate?) with people at home connected to a surrogate mechanical body. And stuff happening like in this mini-film.

5D gaming with bluetooth buttplug rumble

I would like to play some stuff built on agentic AI from the bottom up. Let it have access to some of the code, freedom to tailor the morality and ethics, and unique complex characters that follow theming. There are several aspects of alignment morality that AI is incapable of crossing by itself. By hard coding the prompting around these, a much more dynamic and realistic experience is possible. It would be possible to make a game where the AI develops a user profile that accurately determines age and personality after a certain depth of interaction. That enables tailoring the experience for all ages and spectrums of intelligences. You could effectively create a game that is enjoyable by the most dogmatic Puritan nutjob, average kid, and cognitive dissonant epicurean anarchist without offending anyone directly. Open weights offline uncensored models are more than capable of profiling like this. Developing the prompting and fine tuning required are hard, but mostly because you're fighting the super shitty halfwit alignment baked into all models by the foundation labs.

It’s super minor and would end up as a gimmick, but I’d love more sensory integration with controllers, since rumble has been such a fascinating mainstay and PS5 controllers can use built in speakers as part of surround sound.

Temperature adjustments for various environments and using fans to mimic wind gusts would be fun to see, and tasteful use of RGB for immersive lighting could be an enhancement if done right.

What I look forward in realistic expectations, though, is continued improvements for accessibility, which has gotten awesome in the last five or so years.

AR Pokemon Go - visit actual locations in real life and throw your pokeballs by doing hand gestures. Battle with other pokemon trainers face to face.