Gaming at CES 2021

If E3 was the Alec Baldwin of press conferences for gaming news, then CES is like the Stephen Baldwin of press conferences for gaming news. Or E3 is the John Belushi and CES is the Jim Belushi. Whichever celebrity sibling analogy works best for you.

With 2020 seeing a big uptick in new gamers, the Consumer Electronics Show 2021 was a great opportunity to give a peak underneath the hood of what the future of gaming holds.

Key announcements

While CES isn’t traditionally the place where game developers and publishers make big announcements, it’s usually the time for companies that make the parts that power the computers or consoles to come out and shine.

The two behemoths in this space are Advanced Micro Devices (known as AMD) and NVIDIA.

AMD kicked things off by announcing new processor chips for desktops and laptops that boost the overall functionality of computers. Think of it like upgrading the engine of a car. They also announced a new chip for servers and cloud data centers named Milan. The improvements these chips would bring extend beyond gaming, into areas like boosting the graphical processing power for CGI in films or helping weather forecasters create a faster and more accurate model. The benefits of these new chip technologies could be applied to practically any industry, bringing innovation at a much faster pace.

NVIDIA announced the new GeForce RTX 3060, a mid-range graphics card designed to get ray traced gaming to every PC gamer. They focus on lower price chips for PC laptops, making gamers around the world salivate at the RTX capabilities. Another announcement was, 3080 laptops would be coming this year, bringing the powerful gaming graphics card to portable form.

Sony also managed to squeeze in a few game release announcements. Notable games include Kena: Bridge to Spirits coming out in March 2021, Ghostwire Tokyo coming out in October 2021, Square Enix’s Project Athia given an early 2022 release window, and Capcom’s Pragmata being pushed to 2023.

So while not chockfull of announcements like E3 or the Tokyo Game Show, CES 2021 provided a nice sneak peak into what the future of gaming could bring. If I may leave you with a parting celebrity sibling analogy, think of CES as the Kate Mara to E3’s Rooney Mara.

Written by Joe Shieh, Manager, Digital Investment