BMW Group and AirConsole have announced the launch of a competition to develop games tailored to the in-car experience. With this new competition, both companies are aiming to tap into the potential of the global game developer community while developers are invited to pioneer the field of in-car gaming. The BMW Group and AirConsole will jointly promote the competition at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco taking place from March 20 to March 24, 2023.
Starting today, interested developers can submit their ideas and concepts by June 8, 2023, via the official competition website. Among the submitted concepts, the best four will be selected as winners and will receive 5,000 euros for the development of a prototype. If the prototype looks good to the organizers, AirConsole will fully fund the development of the game to then be included on the AirConsole platforms and the winners will also be invited to the BMW Group Headquarters in Munich to see the result in action.
Stefan Butz, Vice President BMW Group Development for Entertainment and Apps commented:
This competition is a great opportunity for game developers to work with AirConsole to create engaging gaming experiences specifically for vehicles. We want to offer our customers a first-class entertainment experience and gaming is all about joy.
Antti Makkonen, Director of Games at AirConsole also added:
As highlighted by the automotive industry at CES, gaming in the car is happening. 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.
These are good times to be alive if you are a gamer because we never thought that companies would actually work towards adding video games to in-car entertainment systems. Gaming is taking on all different shapes and sizes today and having them pre-installed in ICEs is appearing to be the next trend that many developers are looking into for their models. BMW Group is pretty active already in the gaming division with different partnerships in the past and now it appears like BMW is aiming to take this partnership to the next level. We are certainly excited to see what sort of video games will eventually become part of in-car entertainment systems however with the level of progress the technology has already done, it won’t be long before we will be playing AAA titles built into the cars.
What are your thoughts on BMW and AirConsole hosting the developer competition for in-car games? Would you be interested in playing games in your car? Let us know in the comments section below.
