Video games creep back into CES after the death of E3

Video games have not been a big part of CES since the mid-1990s, when the Electronic Entertainment Expo gave publishers and hardware vendors their own exhibition platform. However, with E3 officially canceled in a December 2023 press release, there was an opportunity for games to flock back to CES 2024, held Jan. 8–12 in Las Vegas.

While there may not have been an influx of new faces from the games industry at CES 2024, companies that already had a foothold at CES, such as Sony Group Corp. and NVIDIA Corp., were noticeably more games-focused than they have been in recent years.

Sony positioned its PlayStation brand prominently with the guiding message that games are not only its top revenue driver, but also a driver for its other business lines. For instance, the Gran Turismo racing simulator was shown in a kiosk that resembled a set design from the Sony-distributed "Gran Turismo" movie. A soon-to-be released remaster of zombie-hunting game Last of Us Part II for the PlayStation 5 was positioned as a bridge between seasons 1 and 2 of the Sony Pictures Television-produced "Last of Us" TV show.

Just as games drive film and TV, the film and TV portfolio can drive new games. The company also had stations set up to try Sony Pictures Virtual Reality's Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord.

Sony's game development resources were also apparent in the company's music division, which is creating brand experiences for its artists in metaverse hubs such as Roblox Corp.'s Roblox and Epic Games Inc.'s Fortnite.

On a related note, Qualcomm Inc. was still talking handheld gaming at its booth on the show floor, even if most of the space was dedicated to automotive tech. Behind closed doors, Qualcomm had Sony's PlayStation Portal, which is running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon G1 chip.

NVIDIA has taken a light touch to CES over the past few years but returned with a battery of game tech and hardware in 2024. The centerpiece of the showcase was a round of new GPUs for desktop PCs: the 4080 Super, the 3070 Ti Super and the 3070 Super.

Consumers can expect boosted clock speeds but the same onboard RAM counts compared to the base models, which are only about a year old. Pricing remains the same with the 3070 Ti and 3070, but the 4080 Super gets a $200 price cut from the base 4080 to $999. These refinements put the 40-series graphics cards in a better position to sell to the gaming community, which responded with a generally cool reception to the value of upgrading from 30-series cards.

However, any softness in sales from gamers has been more than offset by NVIDIA's surging artificial intelligence platforms in its datacenter business.

As if to sharpen the point around the company's AI edge, NVIDIA demonstrated how well its consumer-grade GPUs handled generative tasks. One unit at the show delivered stable diffusion tasks running on local hardware at a fraction of the time most cloud-rendered solutions would take.

Another demo offered a chat GPT-like generative AI program pulling data out of local files. The benefit to performing such data scraping locally is that user data would not have to be exposed to the cloud-based AI tools that are likely to collect and index that data for their own purposes.

And, of course, AI is being used to improve image quality in video games. Specifically, AI can be used to boost frame rates without a big impact to image quality, which makes a game appear smoother in motion and can give competitive gamers an edge.

Frame generation techniques are starting to deliver more frames than most displays can handle. In fact, most TVs top out at 60 frames per second, while some higher-end sets can achieve 120 frames per second. To see higher frame rates than that, a user is more than likely going to be looking at gaming monitors rather than TVs.

Display manufacturers are increasingly attuned to gamers' appetite for more frames and delivered some striking advancements at the show. ASUSTeK Computer Inc. announced a 1440p OLED gaming monitor with a native 480 Hz refresh rate that could deliver 480 frames of video game imagery per second. Not far behind, LG Electronics Inc. showed an OLED capable of 480 Hz at 1080p.

Other vendors, including TCL Electronics Holdings Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., had plenty of impressive monitors topping out at 240 Hz, including some at 4K resolution, which for now is more than enough for most gamers, even those with an advanced NVIDIA GPU.

Notes on cloud gaming

Cloud gaming almost seemed a matter of course at this year's CES. While stakeholders were sure to mention that cloud was still a focus, there was little buzz around new functionality or strategy to rapidly grow the market.

NVIDIA highlighted that its GeForce NOW service was adding compatibility for an array of Blizzard-developed titles, such as Diablo IV, as part of its deal with Microsoft Corp. and listed a few new datacenters coming on board, including in Thailand, Chile, Poland and Japan.

The new Japan server is notable because NVIDIA already has a partnership with SoftBank Corp. to distribute cloud gaming in Japan, and that arrangement will persist while the new server will be owned and operated by NVIDIA.

Samsung also carved out space at its booth to reassert its Gaming Hub service on smart TVs, which allows newer Tizen OS TVs to access several cloud gaming services. The biggest new announcement we saw around Game Hub was a certification program for third-party controllers.

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