In-car gaming in 2023 is mostly restricted to your kids playing on their phones in the back seat or you playing something via the infotainment screen when parked up in one of the few cars on sale that offer games.
But as autonomous technology becomes more sophisticated allowing us to delegate driving duties to our cars, gaming will be a massive growth area. We’ve already heard that the new EV being developed by Sony and Honda could come with an in-built Playstation 5, and now BMW has announced an initiative to ensure it’s also at the forefront of that in-car entertainment revolution.
The automaker has teamed up with nDream and its AirConsole games brand to launch a competition to develop a new generation of games designed specifically to be enjoyed from inside a car using a vehicle’s infotainment screen.
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BMW and AirConsole will promote the competition at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco that starts March 24, and game developers have until June 8 to submit their ideas. The brains behind the best four will each receive $5,000 (or $5,000 if in Europe) towards the cost of developing a prototype, and if any of those prototypes is judged to have promise AirConsole will throw more cash behind the idea to get it ready to be hosted on the company’s platform. The creator will also be invited to BMW’s Munich HQ to see the finished game inside one of the firm’s cars.
“As highlighted by the automotive industry at CES, gaming in the car is happening,” Antti Makkonen, Director of Games at AirConsole, said. “Game makers need to start creating games for the car use-case, not just bring games to the car. Using phones as controllers inside the car makes playing accessible and fun for everyone, especially when considering that not everybody will own a game controller, or that playing directly on the car touch screen makes your arm tire quite fast.”
Got a great idea for a game? Submit your entries at airconsole.com/in-car-contest-23.
