DLSS, an incredible GPU tech innovation, has quietly revolutionized the gaming industry. This landmark technology in the history of graphics cards uses AI-powered upscaling to allow developers to push game visuals further than ever before without sacrificing performance. When it first launched, it was overshadowed by the more obviously flashy ray tracing, but it’s gone on to be the far more impactful innovation of the two, fundamentally changing what’s possible in PC games. Genuine technological leaps forward for gaming are rarer now than they once were, but this is one that quietly took the industry by storm.
The rise and fall of No Man's Sky
The release of No Man’s Sky in 2016 was a watershed moment for the concept of the ‘Everything Game’—that idea that developers could create an endless universe where you really could go anywhere and do anything. Sky-high expectations were dashed against the reality of what a small team was capable of, and for many it was a huge disappointment. Over the years since, however, Hello Games has buckled down, continuing to work on it and in the process setting the template for the modern videogame redemption story. The No Man’s Sky of today contains everything that was promised and far more—but the fact that it’s taken eight years past release to get there is its own cautionary tale about developer ambition.
The second great esports wave and bubble
In the last 10 years, we’ve seen how big esports can get—and also how far it can fall. When the Overwatch League launched in 2018, with million buy-in fees for teams in its first season and up to million the next, it had a ripple effect across the industry. Team valuations and salaries spiked like never before as new leagues formed with their own multi-million dollar franchise fees, and for a while we saw esports on an incredible new level of scale and production value. That explosive growth couldn’t last, however, and as Overwatch League began to stumble and eventually closed, many of those other new leagues were on the same trajectory, leading to the rocky state of things we see today. But the future is still bright—esports have more mainstream awareness and a bigger audience than ever, and grassroots work in the community is helping to carve out a new and exciting path forward.
Baldur’s Gate 3 caps off an RPG golden age
Just as The Witcher 3 pushed the boundaries of the genre in 2015, in 2023 Baldur’s Gate 3 blew them apart. No one could have predicted that the most exciting, most talked about, and most impactful game of that year would be an old school isometric RPG, but the intricate sandbox Larian crafted, coupled with surging interest in Dungeons & Dragons, made for a huge mainstream success story. There’s a lot that makes Baldur’s Gate 3 stand out—from its brilliantly memorable characters, to its use of mo-cap to bring dialogue to life, to its weird and wonderful world. But its greatest strength is just how much agency it hands to players. At every step you’re given the power to choose what to do and how to do it, and almost any action you can think of is allowed and, in many cases, actively anticipated with a unique interaction to reward you.
Twitch expands the meaning of gaming culture
The last decade of PC gaming has been hugely shaped by Twitch and the many content creators who stream on it. Hundreds of millions now log in every month to keep up with their favourite channels, and streamers can be enormously influential over which games succeed or fail—including launching tiny indies into mega-stardom. Watching other people play games is now almost as integral to the hobby as playing games yourself, and Twitch’s biggest hitters are some of the most famous celebrities of gaming culture. Meanwhile, the breadth of streams available only gets wider and, it has to be admitted, weirder.
