A new decade and a big year for the game industry ahead.

I'd rather be thinking about gaming instead of the real world for a few moments...

We are in for a rollercoaster year in gaming, right?

• Final Fantasy VII remake, The Last of Us 2, Doom Eternal (Doom games are great again!), Half-Life Alyx, Skull & Bones, Animals Crossing, Ghost of Tsushima, Watch Dogs: Legion, Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise, Bravely Default 2, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, etc. Also games like Marvel's Avengers which is a big push for a licensed game being done by a good developer - but it could be great or trash! CyberPunk 2077 is used to come out and it could be amazing if it is ready. Is CD Projekt Red on the very edge of being "the developer" of western RPGs that matter, taking the crown away from Bethesda? Moreover, this seems like the year where Microsoft's studio buying spree of the past five years will pay off. What will come out of these studios could be very important because they could be REALLY good.
  
  
• Then we have new systems coming out, and this feels like a historical system moment in gaming. We have a mature storyline of XBox vs PS 2, XB360 vs PS3, Xbox One vs PS4, and now what cans be described as two companies with their sword edges honed razor sharp preparing to clash again. I call it a clash, but I think both MS and Sony will have very smooth launches.

• PC gaming will have some changes coming. Yes, in its current incarnation Stadia sucks - but when it gets fixed over the next year. Keep in mind Valve Steam sucked hard when it first launch - gamers HATED Steam when it launched. Thus, despite Stadia fumbling badly, they are not down yet. AMD being in consoles, Stadia servers, and increasingly building in gaming PC builds put AMD on a different level this year. So AMD is on the rise at least with gamers; so, 2019 might just have been the last year, for a while, where high end PC gaming builds have Intel CPUs. Zen 3 Milan will be a curb-stomp on Intel's head on the CPU side. In addition, is this the year we see consumer/gamer videos cards that have their own SSDs on board? You better hope so if you are part of the PC master race, because Xbox Series X and PS5 likely will be using that tech. If you are thinking of using Christmas money to buy an RTX 2080 or 2070 - I wouldn't. Moreover, if AMD makes that sort of card, with its own dedicated ssd, Navi will be very interesting.

• E3. (sigh) Yeah, that elephant is in the room for 2020. This is I think the truly last chances Entertainment Software Association has to make e3 matter. Now you would think with a lunch year that e3 would have Sony and Microsoft lined up to make huge presentation inside of e3....but will they? Sony skipped e3 2019 and it woudl be a power move to do it again in a systems launch year. It seem pretty clean that game developers & publisher have felt neglected by the ESA. Oh, there will be gaming news coming out during the week of e3, but keep a keen eye out for if it actually HAPPENING inside or outside of e3.

• VR is not dead...Despite being told that VR is deceased and that it had been nailed to its perch, the proprietors insists that it is ‘pining for the fjords’ or ‘simply stunned’. This will not be a big year for hardware or software, but I think VR will be brewing very strong below the surface.

Prediction for the decade leading into 2030:

We, as in gamers, will all own at least 3D holographics displays for gaming it might be in our phone, but some will have it on the desk. No glasses. Viewable from wide angles. Early this decades there will be many standards for real-time 3D holographic displays, but by 2030 we will be down to two standards which will likely have two uses cases. The good news is, you won't hear about anything beyond 8k for the next ten years. No 12K or 16K displays except in science departments and labs, all the innovation and technical advancement will be real-time 3D holography. And, yeah, if you adopt early you will go back to 2K imagery that struggles to refresh about 60fps! The new argument of message boards will be "Is that really 1080p Holographic HDR imagery @ 120 fps?!" and "Can watch PorN on Samsung laser holographic HDTV...or will I go blind!"

Huh never heard of these GPUs with SSDs on them, should be interesting. Also about the 3D monitors, I don't see that tech taking off until the end of the decade honestly, people were recently burnt by 3D tech in TVs and I just don't see them trusting it for a while. I just watched some videos on Looking Glass tech though and it was neat, but it's going to be so expensive it will take years to become anything near standard.

I can't ignore the Steam comparison, yes Steam was bad at launch, i say that because it bricked my computer at the time leading me to protest it for months, but it very quickly became an excellent store with regular offers and an attractive market for indie and AAA during the seventh generation, when PC gaming was nearly destroyed.
Thanks to Valve PC gaming is bigger than it has ever been, even the consoles are starting to look like PC's, Stadia hasn't simply had a stumble due to a technical issue its flaws are 100% to do with how it's being marketed and the inherent disadvantages of how it works.
Where Steam stumbled at the start by introducing a digital store to a world that was just getting to grips with broadband, Google is trying is taking advantage of the market Valve created by offering an alternative, in a way that is either greedy or half baked.
I'm biased, i have zero interest in streaming games, but Google haven't done themselves any favours.

@casepb:Looking Glass is neat, but there are a few other methods, with the mostly likely to get traction for gamers being Samsung's. As Samsung describes it back in 2016, light would be projected through a panel and lens that would produce images that sit 'off' of the screen, ready to be looked at from multiple angles. So its about lasers, lenses, projection, and eye tracking.

Some of the methods for 3D holographic displays are a bit esoteric to understand they might be talking about what Looking Glass is going or what Samsung is doing but it hard to say. I think in five years ist will be without a doubt be on small displays, but by 2030 will be on large living room tvs and desktop displays. In 2015 there was talk of a smartphone taht worked like a 3DS that simulated 3D and now I think there is one where the images is above the smartphones screen surface ..or appears to be.

What I think will surprises people is that variations and different methods for real-time 3D holographic devices, have been in development with working prototypes since 2015! So when they tech comes ist will come very fast. Certain system will be good for walking around a display Holo-table or Holographic Orchestra-pit. Certain system will be good for people seated viewing a screen like they would a TV or monitors. And other systems will be good for looking at by you don't turn or move you head you tilt, say a smartphone, and they viewers seeing multiple sides (a method that 3DS did fairly well).