During the  Slush conference , some important personalities of the videogame industry gave their predictions on the trend of 2018. The CEO of  Paradox , or  Fredrik Wester , said that in 2018 the real winners will be the players, while Virtual Reality will be the sure loser. Wester  stated that in 2018, users will take back power, and will use it to combat aggressive monetization practices recently adopted by the industry. Here are his words:

2018 will be the year in which gamers will regain power. We are seeing it right now, thanks to the debate of the loot boxes that  EA  wanted to introduce in  Star Wars Battlefront II . I think we are seeing this on various occasions. We need more transparency. We have to choose the business model to adopt, together with the players and not hit them in the face. All of this will certainly become more evident in the next year.

Wester  obviously also refers to other cases in which an AAA title has implemented microtransactions and prize boxes inside it, just think of Middle-earth: Shadow of War and  Destiny 2 . But that’s not all, as Wester continued like this when talking about VR: 

If you have an HTC Vive or other headset, you have a high-end device, very expensive, very heavy and you are not free to move. This is the current state of VR and this is why the mass market is struggling to catch on. People also talk about putting a phone in front of their eyes. This is another step back from the Vive, even more difficult to accept. It moves even further away from the ideal concept of Virtual Reality. Give VR another 5 years and it may even be a success, but in 2018 it will be dead dead.

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