What lies ahead for video games in 2019?

Harry Potter, The Last of Us and Kingdom Hearts are likely to be the stars of the year - but streaming could change everything

Video games are a fast-moving form of art and entertainment, and that makes the games industry a notoriously difficult one to predict. Sure, new Fifa and Call of Duty games will arrive every year and sell predictably well, there'll probably be a new Assassin's Creed, and Nintendo will usually deliver a fresh take on Mario, Zelda or Poki(C)mon - but who could have foreseen that 2018 would be obliterated by Fortnite, a colourful cartoon shooter that launched to little fanfare in 2017 but became a global phenomenon over the course of last year? Or that one of 2018's most critically acclaimed games would be a psychedelic virtual-reality version of 80s obsession, Tetris?

Games are now almost as varied as the people who play them - more than two billion of all ages, across the world, playing on phones or PCs or PlayStations. But apart from Rockstar's western epic Red Dead Redemption 2, whose 550m opening weekend made the kind of splash seen only every few years, the biggest earners of 2018 were games that have been around for years: Clash Royale and Poki(C)mon Go on mobile, League of Legends and Counter-Strike on PC, and the omnipresent Fortnite. The money that these established, evolving mega-games make is astounding: it's estimated that Fortnite now earns its creator Epic Games about $100m (78.5m) a week. In terms of revenue, any new game released in 2019 will struggle to compete.