The DeanBeat: 10 predictions for games in 2017

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
January 20, 2017
Updated June 18, 2025
8 min

Every year I make wildly inaccurate predictions about the future of games, and that time has come again. I go through this exercise not only to suffer great embarrassment, but but also to sharpen my thinking by looking back over the years in an attempt to find the future.

I have written more than 13,000 stories for VentureBeat over the past nine years, and many of those are about games. I’ve heard so many predictions, and it’s easy to make fun of them. I figure it is only fair to go out on a limb myself with my own augmented reality view of the future.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.