How technology drives the evolving gaming industry

As gaming and streaming becomes a viable career option, many people have begun to pursue it. Moreover, a large number of people started turning to the virtual world of gaming during the pandemic, perhaps as a means to stay connected and socialize, overcome anxiety and boredom, as well as to express themselves. No wonder, with 373 million players in 2022, the Indian games market became the second biggest in the world by number of players.

It seems we have entered the golden age of gaming; it has become a mass medium today attracting massive audiences (both playing and watching content and streams). The entire gaming ecosystem has also evolved greatly, but the evolution of games is not limited to better and richer graphics; it also extends to better and more beautiful storytelling – games are becoming intriguing, full of immersive plots, subplots, and twists. Loaded with rich graphics and longer runs, the result is that games are becoming bigger in file size with some games even reaching up to 250GB. As a result, having the right technology or storage can become a deal-maker or breaker when it comes to a seamless or immersive gaming experience.

Right storage

While feature-rich and high-graphic games are easily available today, these games can end up occupying a lot of space in a computer (or device?). In absence of the right storage, one may end up facing issues, including a lengthy boot time or longer load time of games, or even worse, frozen screens during gameplay. The important point to note is that just having enough storage is not enough. In fact, as per the ‘Next-gen Indian PC Gamer’ study, commissioned by Western Digital and conducted by CMR, 57{38557cf0372cd7f85c91e7e33cff125558f1277b36a8edbab0100de866181896} of gamers have cited slow storage as a critical factor for the poor gaming experience. Furthermore, 51{38557cf0372cd7f85c91e7e33cff125558f1277b36a8edbab0100de866181896} of gamers stated slow game loading besides bandwidth issues as some of the main areas of concern2. This is why gamers need purpose-built gaming storage solutions that are designed for gaming. These solutions provide more capacity, and most importantly, offer accelerated speeds, so they can get into their games at lightning speeds and win faster.
For example, WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD helps crush load times and slash throttling, lagging, and model pop-ins for a smooth, fast experience that lets gamers compete at their absolute peak. The purpose-built gaming drive helps sustain top-end performance for more consistent gameplay and delivers top-tier performance with ridiculously short load times for a top-notch gaming experience.

Gamers love playing immersive, graphic-rich games, which are either downloaded or directly streamed. Undoubtedly, games have never looked more stunning, but these also require large capacities of storage to play and store. Moreover, with advancements in technology, VR and AR games may also see mass appeal, which could mean that even bigger capacities and faster storage are needed. The storage industry must continue to innovate and introduce more advanced solutions focused on speed and capacity so that the gaming industry can continue to evolve.

*1 MB/s = 1 million bytes per second. Based on internal testing; performance may vary depending upon host device, usage conditions, drive capacity, and other factors.
**Available on the 1TB and 2TB drives
***1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less depending on operating environment.

END OF ARTICLE