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There has been a notable push over the last few years to improve accessibility in game development. From behemoth studios such as Naughty Dog to indie developers such as Special Magic Games, new accessibility features are being implemented and innovated upon but there s some catching up to be done when it comes to the marketing and PR for those very same products.
Marketing takes many forms across different media online trailers, adverts in magazines, even altering London underground signs to promote a new console launch. In the games industry, social media marketing has become the quickest way to deliver promotional assets and information, and some companies have started sharing information about accessibility features prior to a game s launch, detailing what features will be available. Team17 published an accessibility-focused trailer for Overcooked! All You Can Eat, for example, and Naughty Dog presented an extensive blog post for The Last of Us Part 2.
When games are hard on their hands, some players turn their voices into controllers
Voice control provides unique opportunities for accessibility and some complicated setup
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As both a software engineer and an avid player of strategy games, chaosparrot struggled to reckon with the damage his work and hobbies had done to his hands. By 2017, the consistent pain of his repetitive stress injuries was bad enough that he could no longer type comfortably or enjoy the games he loved to play. While searching for solutions, he came across a video of someone using speech recognition software to code. He decided to try using the same tech not for coding, but for playing games.
Game Demos Need to Come Back For Many Reasons, Especially for Accessibility
Disabled players can t keep relying on other peoples experiences and should be able to test a game before making a purchase.
I remember being a young’un and getting excited as the next subscription for my PlayStation Official Magazine, PC Gamer Magazine, or the Official Xbox Magazine would land in the shops. I’d be excited about the content within the pages; reviews, editorials, and facts tucked away in boxouts. But the biggest selling point came with each magazines’ monthly physical disc that contained numerous demos although sometimes just one big demo. Simply throw the disc in your console, and you were able to instantly load up a small demo of a game. No downloading, no installing.
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The sun is setting on 2020, a year dominated by political upheaval, a once-in-a-century global pandemic, and no small amount of other front-page news events that kept us all glued to our phones night after night.
In the age of doomscrolling, the game industry churned on, buoyed by both unexpected success from the prevalence of lockdown orders across the globe and rocked by the same upheavals that impacted ordinary folks around the globe.
Here s a breakdown of the 10 trends and events that defined our industry this year. Maybe someday we ll learn some lessons from them.
The Fucking Pandemic
For better and for worse the global spread of COVID-19 reshaped the video game industry in ways that will be felt for years to come. Large studios suddenly developed robust remote work infrastructure. Physical events that shaped the year s marketing cycle were canceled. Developers of all stripes saw their daily average users spike upward, and multiple companiesreported huge increases to