10 Features That Will Define Next-Gen Gaming

1. Cross-Platform Saves Become A Major Selling Point

Cross-platform play has been a huge talking point for the last year-or-so, but being able to play games with people from other platforms is really just a precursor to a wider issue - that is, being able to swiftly resume save files across platforms with a single unified account.

Google has already stated their commitment to allowing devs to enable cross-saves for as many games as possible on Stadia, though it's safe to say that industry-wide adoption will roll out far more slowly.

Cross-saves are especially useful for multiplayer live-service games. Case in point - after an embarrassing amount of push-back, Sony recently relented and allowed Fortnite to offer cross-progression totally restriction-free.

But this is still very much an outlier, and though there aren't that many people playing AAA retail games across multiple platforms, it'll do wonders for the free-to-play market. And more than anything else, it never hurts to give people more options for how they choose to play.

We will definitely see progress in this regard over the course of the generation, with more and more titles making cross-saves a standard, hopefully to the point that it will be widely embraced within a few years.

Which features do you predict will define the next generation of gaming? Shout them out in the comments!