The ongoing US-China trade conflict signals a dark turn of our economic landscape, and it seems console gaming is no exception to that.
Since the spike in production tariffs in China, big game companies in Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have no doubt been affected, causing them to relocate their operations to other parts of the globe, in spite of their combined efforts to shrug off the Trump administration from imposing a rather steep tariff on their operations in China.
This no doubt would lead to a domino effect of the “Big Three” in gaming to take a hit on their overall financial performance in the coming year, with potential delays in manufacturing their latest consoles as they try to strike up new partnerships in other countries in the region.
Next-gen consoles such as the PS5 by Sony PlayStation and Xbox Scarlett by Microsoft could be the ones most affected by this.
Not only would production on the new hardware be slower, but it would certainly be much more expensive, especially since these new machines are built using improved technologies to facilitate new features such as lightning-quick load speeds and backwards compatibility.
Despite this, the following year should still be a huge one for gaming, with heavily-anticipated titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Remake, The Last of Us Part II among those set to take the world by storm on current-gen consoles.
Marion has a serious RPG addiction. Sometimes it bleeds into real life; he forgets to sleep because he thinks he has a Witcher’s body clock. Forgive him in advance if he suddenly blurts out terms such as “Mind Flayer” and “Magic Missile”, because never once does he stop thinking about his next Dungeons & Dragons game.
Si Jia
