The cancellation of E3, gaming’s annual expo, wasn’t entirely unexpected – and it’s fair to say the pandemic played a significant, if not starring, role in its demise.

Due to be held in LA this June, E3 has long been the premier showcase for new products and platforms. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii U were all unveiled at the event, but following the emergence of livestreamed showcases during the pandemic, publishers and developers have pivoted towards the Apple playbook.

However, its loss is far from the only impact successive lockdowns had on gaming, of which G2A’s chief product officer Pawel Trocki is well aware. He says tough economic headwinds, worsened by the war in Ukraine, have left developers shying away from big innovations for now.

‘I don’t see any major innovations to break through the market this year to be honest,’ says Trocki. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t see great prospects for the gaming market or the entertainment industry – I think they have a great future, but that’s in the long run. 

‘In the short term, say one, two, three years, I think there are pretty heavy headwinds because of interest rate inflation and the footprint that has on the cost of labour and the cost of development. There’s a lot of uncertainty going on in the market and normally this is not the environment where you have heavy investment in innovations, where you have an appetite for investment.

‘Big companies, big publishers, will focus on well-known titles, maybe sequels, remakes – they’re probably not going to invest in new projects.’

Trocki is speaking on the morning of G2A’s annual Winter Party, a celebration of the year’s achievements for the company’s staff. Headquartered in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, the group’s research and development wing is spread across Poland. Poland is where the party’s at, specifically in Rzeszów’s G2A-sponsored arena. 

The city made headlines recently when Prince William made a surprise visit, thanking British troops based at the airport just over the road from the arena for ‘keeping an eye’ on neighbouring Ukraine, the border just an hour away.

The cumulative effect of Putin’s invasion on top of the pandemic has, as Trocki said, led to tough economic times across the globe. However, while not suggesting the pandemic was a positive in any way, he does add that lockdowns and the many hours families spent at home together changed some parents’ views on gaming, and exposed a new, older generation to its virtual worlds.

‘Predominantly gaming is for younger generations,’ says Trocki. ‘But the pandemic showed there’s huge interest for older generations too. As we sat at home we spent more time with our family, and [previously] there was this kind of feeling that playing games is a waste of time, not the proper way to spend time together – in Poland it’s always ‘you should go outside and play football’. 

‘But [during lockdown] I think adults realised gaming is a good way to spend time together.’

However, while families may be spending more time playing together, Trocki doesn’t think they’ll be meeting each other in the metaverse just yet.

‘So far I don’t think the metaverse has yielded enough results,’ he says. ‘You’ve seen Facebook and other companies not really developing in the way anticipated two, three years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s not valid, just it’s going to take much longer for the trend to expand.

‘And it’s definitely valid for the gaming industry across a lot of devices, as it doesn’t matter if you’re desktop or mobile, but it will require a certain cooperation between the publishers, marketplaces and payment providers, both for in-game purchases and physical shopping. That might take a few years because the metaverse is something totally new.’

G2A knows marketplaces – that’s how it began and is still it’s primary MO, as a marketplace for game keys. This has not made it universally popular within the industry – some developers have even called for their own games to be pirated because they make little to no money from the purchase of game keys in the jurisdiction they’re sold in.

It has also branched out into giftcards and other software, capitalising on the general shift to digital during the pandemic. Where that leads to next remains to be seen, but Trocki suspects that, whatever the product, generative AI will play a part in the sale.

‘I’m not talking about ChatGPT,’ he says. ‘I mean synthetic reality, voice AI – imagine your favourite celebrities collaborating with marketplaces and brands to turn them into an assistant.’

So not just your regular advert, but A-listers on the shop floor.

‘I don’t know if they will do that or will be bold enough to do that, but you can imagine Brad Pitt helping out in your hot food sales,’ he adds.

Pitt himself might not be thrilled at the idea of that, but the technology to get an Oscar-winning performance from him as a virtual sales assistant in Tesco is undoubtedly already here.

‘If you look at social media and how it influences or induces the desire to buy something, not exactly something you may want but you see other people who have it or use it, then you want it to – so imagine you have a ‘fake’ celebrity guiding you through that process. It would definitely have an impact.’

But Trocki also sees a danger in recreating the image and voice of real people.

‘It also causes a great deal of danger, because on the other hand you don’t know what is real,’ he says. ‘It’s a corporate danger and it’s a political danger, you can easily manipulate people, because people don’t understand, they think whatever they see is what actually happened – so if you want to discredit somebody, it’s easy to do so with that type of functionality.’

Certainly where AI is heading is a concern at the top of the agenda right now – so much so that tech leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk have signed an open letter calling for a six-month hiatus in AI development.

Back to gaming, where Trocki predicts a natural slowdown in the current economic climate. Whether that comes to pass and continue as long as he anticipates remains to be seen.

So does whether or not we’ll be bumping into him in the metaverse any time soon.

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