The Future

As a FPS fan for many long years, there's definitely been an evolution. No longer the FPS genre is primary dominant for the PC platform, games being enthusiastically arcadey (games being simple and fast paced), arena shooters being relevant, and many more to list. Nowadays, we see a focus on both console and PC platforms and gamers seem to craze a more "realistic" experience in their shooting games. There's also games that try to include story which was forbidden back in the '90s.

So what's next for the future of first person shooters? Should we go back to the world war settings? Should we combine both the modern and old elements of the two styled shooters? Well, my friends, I personally believe the next step to the future of shooters is eSports.

He's no longer competing, but he makes electrical products for gamers.

I never thought eSports would be so big when I was first exposed to gaming as a living by watching an episode of  MTV's True Life: I'm A Gamer back in 2003. The man's named was Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel. This fascinated me because I always thought there were only gamers like me who just played the game as a hobby, but not as a job. He would go through tournaments with a decent amount of money on the line and win them. He was doing well with a lot of these tournaments where he was able to make a living off of it. I also thought it was kind of a fad at that time, but I was so completely wrong looking back then.

Fast forward to today's times, it's gotten so much more mainstream success as colleges and universities are supporting scholarships to these kinds of games. Not only that, but developers are starting to have more focus on trying to push competitive gaming or eSports as an official sport like basketball or football. On January 28-31 2016, ESPN aired a Halo 5 X Games Aspen tournament on their main channel.

Your new gold medalists: the Evil Genius Halo team.

Professional players are getting many sponsors to help them for traveling expenses and providing them a bonus income. Also, a website called Twitch. allows professional players to play for their fans and they can also make some money if their watchers are interested in donating money to them. This just shows you how eSports is becoming more bigger and alive than ever. Viewership is much bigger than ever as this article will explain everything to you: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/11/monstrous-viewership-numbers-show-league-of-legends-is-still-esports-king/#1453b5394021

It looks like the growth of eSports or exposure only seems to continue.

Developers are also trying to makes games that will work well in the eSport scene. Here are some links I can provide to let you understand what I mean: https://www.primagames.com/games/rainbow-six-siege/feature/rainbow-six-siege-ubisoft-heads-esports and http://esports.inquirer.net/13819/overwatch-everyone-wants-to-be-an-esport

The production value of these tournaments aren't too shabby.

With that said, first person shooters are starting to make a comeback in the eSport scene which been primarily dominated by mobas (multiplayer online battle arena). The prize pool are also getting bigger for these games like Call of Duty Championship 2016 has a prize pool of more than $3 million dollars based on multiple events and tournaments. Counter Strike: Global Offensive is also going to have its first $1 million dollar tournament at the end of March to beginning of April.

Due to all of this is happening, it inspired me to write my investigative story on eSport scholarship for colleges/universities. It's definitely going well and I've been getting a lot of interesting answers. I am happy to see a bright future for eSports, but personally, I do hope to see first person shooters not get completely focused on this style of games.

Cyberpunk is beautiful.

I believe there is still room for future based or cyberpunk driven first person shooters. I always dream of lingering myself and being able to walk around the beautiful cities of Blade Runner, and just shooting whatever nasty thing is a threat to me. There are some games that have done that, but it just didn't click with me completely. I still believe there is room for more experimentation or perfection.

 Why not bring more female protagonists to the genre? We have so many male protagonists and it could be interesting to have a strong heroine throw into the mix. I hope to see single player games still being a main focus to the future of the shooter genre. I come from it and I don't want to see it die as I am aware of how popular multiplayer can be versus playing by your self against AI. It would be a travesty to see the FPS genre only focusing on multiplayer because there are many games I can think of where the single player aspect is extremely well done.

FPS gaming is love and life :).