Coronavirus Games Industry 1

The gaming industry is booming right now, as coronavirus is providing people with more opportunity to play than ever before. However, while the immediate slate of upcoming software seems largely unaffected, it’s next year where we’ll see the affects of the global pandemic. That’s according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, and his insight is almost certain to apply to PlayStation as well.

“Games that were targeting a year from now or beyond? There'll be some impact, but they'll be able to react,” he told Business Insider. “Mocap is just something that's basically stopped. We're not going into mocap studios. If you had all your animation captured and you're doing touch up in more individual art production and in areas like textures and other things, you're in a better position. If you're waiting for a lot of either large audio work – when it's with symphonies and other things – or mocap, you're held up right now.”

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It’s something that we hadn’t really thought about. Most developers have transitioned to a work from home environment, but obviously it’s impossible to shoot key performance capture when social distancing rules apply. This means that, while the PlayStation 5 is still on track for release later this year, we could be faced with a software drought soon after.

Spencer, however, is positive about the industry as a whole: “I'm pretty confident in the industry's ability to continue a steady flow of games coming out. There's just a lot of games in production across the industry right now, and I think we're going to be – as an industry – we're going to be fine. I'm bullish on what this means in the long run for games, even if there's a certain impact to a certain launch window for certain titles that we might see.”

[source markets.businessinsider.com]