The five tech trends driving video games

Video games as a medium tend to be driven by changes in technology. A lot of designers want to play with the newest and latest toys that make their jobs easier and expand their options with the worlds they create. Publishers and their investors are also excited by these new possibilities. Lots of money is being invested in whoever can make a big splash with the newest technology, so here’s five tech trends that are currently driving game development to new space.

1. Machine Learning and AI

Machine learning is not the exact same thing as AI, but both are being used within game development at the moment. While AI can be argued to be a little too broad, machine learning is fairly specific in both its uses and definition. With the recent PlayStation 5 Pro announcement, first-party platform Sony introduced the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution feature — perhaps unfortunately commonly abbreviated as PSSR. This uses AI to increase the effective resolution of a game without taking a hit to performance. With the Nintendo Switch successor (a follow-up to what will likely end up as the most successful console of all time) rumored to be doing something similar leveraging Nvidia’s DLSS technology for frame generation, it seems this kind of tech is here to stay.