How to prepare your business for bad weather

My hometown recently experienced an intense late summer heatwave. With temperatures hovering at a record-breaking 111 degrees one afternoon, I realized that I was the lone person outside at the normally busy community college campus where I teach.

The people I did see outside as I drove home looked understandably weary and stressed by the heat. As I stopped to pick up a few things to prepare a light no-cook supper for my family, I noticed the trashcans outside the store were overflowing with cold drink cups.

Inside the sparsely populated store, I saw some people grabbing watermelon and ice cream. A few others were at a freezer pulling out bags of ice.

There is no doubt that extreme weather affects business. On that day, stores selling cold drinks and ice were bustling, while most retail stores, restaurants and other businesses were slow.

Retail businesses usually see a significant drop in traffic during heatwaves and cold snaps or during stormy weather in any season. Even if your business does not count on in-person traffic, your employees may not be able to get to work or stay as engaged in their work during bad weather. In addition, your supply chain can be significantly interrupted by extreme weather conditions that cause icy roads or delayed air traffic.

Since even the best weather forecaster cannot fully predict how weather swings will affect a business during an extreme weather event, there are some steps you can take to keep your business afloat during bad weather.

Create a weather communication plan. Be clear about setting expectations and communication guidelines for your employees during bad weather. If you have to close your business due to a weather emergency, you don’t want some of your staff attempting to make it into work.  Notify them via group text or through your website of any closings or delays in operation.

For the same reason, have clear communication with your vendors and suppliers about what happens during unexpected weather-related events. While the weather may be a surprise, the way you handle the situation does not have to be.

Keep up with short-term weather forecasts. As a business owner, you are accustomed to keeping up with economic forecasts and with business news. You need to add weather news to that list.

Here’s an example. Knowing that its customers buy more soup in cold, damp and windy weather the Campbell’s Soup Company pays close attention to the weather.  It even links its advertising to the weather forecasts in certain markets with an algorithm called the “Misery Index.” Therefore, if you hear a Campbell’s soup ad on the radio, chances are pretty good that the weather where you are is miserable.

Diversify your product line. I recall a new small business in my town that sold primarily smoothies and iced drinks. The Hawaiian-themed drive-through kiosk seemed to be doing a brisk business during the summer tourist season. As fall neared, however, I watched closely for menu items that would reflect the upcoming temperature changes.

Maybe soup? Hot drinks? However, nothing seemed to change and, not surprisingly, I saw a “For Sale” sign on the shuttered doors before the end of the year.

Seasonal changes are predictable, but you can also experience the occasional cold snap during the summer and warm spell during the winter. Have options for your customers, so that you can meet their needs on a year-round basis.

Check your insurance coverage. Extreme weather events, such as the recent floods in Louisiana, can devastate your business.

The Red Cross calls the flooding in Louisiana the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and estimates that its response efforts should reach at least $30 million.

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) representative Rafael Lemaitre reported on August 21 that more than 25,000 people in Louisiana had already filed flood-related claims.

New to the online business: here are few golden tips

An online business world has a charm so powerful and impactful that it has become one of the biggest platforms for doing business and is considered to be the heaven for budding entrepreneurs as it requires comparatively less capital funding than that of brick and mortar business. So, if you are thinking of getting into an online business world, then here are few things which you must keep in mind before jumping into it.

The first one positive step which is considered to be very decisive and driving force for your business is your target audience and understanding and monitoring their buying behaviour as closely as possible. This is termed as customer profiling and you need to really focus heavily on this element as a lot of business decisions and campaigns would rely on its authenticity. Your customer profiling becomes the building block for your online business and is a very vital element of your overall business plan.

A comprehensive business plan is something which you just can't afford to miss as this is what makes your business credible to pool in investment for your business. Before jumping into an online business venture, you must have a full proof plan for your credit line which is the ultimate and a very basic lifeline for your business. You must have a capital source at least which can run your business for a year in the most adverse conditions when you fail to attract investors. According to experts, no entrepreneur should jump into business if they don't have enough financial source to support their business for at least a year.

Find professionals who can look for website development for your business as this is your face value over the internet and your business would be making a professional impression if done by the professionals and development experts. The reason why it is always recommended to opt for professionals is the fact that they are aware to build a website which has favourable HTML coding to get your website rank high in search engines.

It is advised to plan your marketing and advertising budget in the initial days and also analyse your campaigns to figure out the weak points if any and the scope for future references.

If you are a budding entrepreneur and looking for expert advice and services for your online venture, then we recommend you to contact e-profitbooster.co.uk as they offer valuable IT related services and is known throughout the UK for their competitive price quotes and high performance graph.

Multimedia in Web Design

Website contents are very important as it draws attention of the audience. Using multimedia can really give a huge impact to the viewers. Multimedia is the field consisting of various content forms like audio, text, presentations, images, video, animation and other interactive communications process. It can be documented, displayed and accessed by information content processing equipment, such as electronic and computerized devices. Multimedia devices are used to collect and experience the various multimedia content.

Multimedia can easily enhance any web project by using different content forms and can invite the audience to the website. There are many forms of multimedia such as images, videos, animations, sound files, graphics, etc. that can improve the quality of any website. Using multimedia and web design together can make the content more appealing and convince the people to stay on the particular webpage. In addition, it becomes easy for the people to understand the company's goal, vision and values through the use of multimedia. If the landing page of any website incorporates a startling animation or video background that is able to efficiently supplement the content of the page, then it surely grabs individual's attention. There are many advantages of multimedia in web design, below are some:

Embedded video footage: Embedded video is a great option that provides many benefits to the website. These embedded videos not only serve a website's mission, but also deliver company's message to the audience, engage the viewers, increase the traffic, give company a personality and most importantly strengthen the bond between the company and the people. Just having a video increases click through rates by 55%. Moreover, it is the best way to get visitors to regularly visit your website and take specific buying actions.

Animated information: Flash objects are one of the multimedia features that can be used in web design as well. The benefits of adding flash animations include featuring dynamic, scalable, and media-rich content that stays within one container on a web page. This content can represent an information in an entertaining way. Flash also improves website navigation and make it more interactive and expressive.

Informative images: Images in a multimedia framework consist of informative slideshows or photos that a website visitor can view. These images can make your website content more interesting, gives clarity to the text, encourage social media sharing, and add to the website's professional look. It can even increase the chances that the visitors will check the other contents of the website, especially if it is full of beautiful, informative and interesting images.

Increase webpage rankings for Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Adding multimedia elements in a web design assignments are an excellent way of improving SEO process. Search engines tend to notice multimedia content more than anything else, as it has greater impact on the overall content. SEO is all about ensuring that you use the relevant keywords often throughout your website, and multimedia contents, such as images, videos, slideshows, etc. provide you with the same opportunity. This will actually bring additional traffic to the webpage.

Better branding: Incorporating multimedia to the web pages is an effective way of grabbing in more audience and building brand. Nowadays, people are more visual. Websites offering a wide variety of digital media, like video, images and slideshows, achieve even more engagement. Honestly, one cannot effectively get a brand without adding multimedia content to build brand recognition.

Sound or audio: Adding a sound clip can enhance your web design project and deliver the website visitors message in the form of recorded speech. In this way, people can access your website content in times and places where reading would be rather inaccessible. If you include sound into your website, then always insert descriptions within the HTML code and consider linking to a transcript. These additional measures enable people to review the contents of featured sound files in the event when an accessibility issue arises.

Make website lively: Multimedia make a website lively and pleasant.Today's readers aren't interested in just seeing a static content. These visual elements will add colour and interest to your website content, and break up all that plain text.

These were the few advantages of multimedia in web design. However, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. While multimedia elements can help a site with search engines, content that is not handled properly can harm a website's ranking. Also, multimedia content takes much time to load than plain content and requires a good bandwidth.

In conclusion, multimedia elements act as a gold mine for your webpage. They will not only help, make your webpage more interesting, also if they are integrated with quality content, will appeal to more subscribers and viewers to your website. They make your website outstanding, notable and inspires people to return for more. So, don't be boring! Start including stimulating, interesting multimedia content on your website to get tremendous benefits.

Multimedia content is an integral part of Digital Marketing. Shaw Academy is the world's largest online education provider and teaches more than 300,000 new students every month. For more information, check Shaw Academy's online Digital Marketing program and the course review.

Web Design Trends Of 2016 For Class Apart Websites

Change is inevitable! Same is the case with web world. With technology changing so swiftly the demand of the internet world is also growing rapidly. Whether it is the zest to do something new or keep on enhancing user experience with every passing day which is responsible for the technological advancement. But this change is certainly for good.

To develop class apart websites you need to hire WordPress developers possessing the experience as well as the cutting edge talent to match pace with the development. Let us find out what all changes took place in the world world of CMS website developments in 2015.

No pain to the fingers: Websites with complete scrolling

Nowadays we have websites which will astonish you with their scrolling features. Mobile devices might be the reasons for the Web Development Companies to shift there focus  to scrolling as it provides a rich user experience. Furthermore, scrolling also improves the page loading time of the website and this is a very welcoming news as we know that page loading time plays a crucial role in the performance.   However, while implementing scrolling you need to go through some case studies. Mentioned below is a graph which shows that users attention is highest till the first 800 pixels and then after it experiences a major drop.

Images are a growing trend in the web business and most of the companies use high quality graphics  in the background which has become a growing trend of 2015. Another major reason of using large images for background is due to the mobile development. This is because that the mobile image background looks better on mobile devices.

Flat design is getting popular

Earlier the designers use to choose a lot of patterns , bubbles , shadows and gradients, but 2015 is the year of flat design. Flat designs are considered as the most intuitive designs which was adopted by several websites and eventually emerged as the most popular design trend of 2015.

More stress on Typography

Typography has emerged as an important factor in a successful web design. Well the trend of using typography as a medium to improve aesthetics became an important feature in the web development  trends. With new fonts arriving in the market every single day it is becoming quite evident to choose the best typography in order to deliver your message in a lucid manner.

Narratives have replaced the monotonous banners

Story telling has become one of the most important part of the web development world as it has replaced the monotonous banners used from quite sometime. In 2015, we saw that storytelling has gained credence and has also increased the engagement quotient of the website. Story telling with specified brand content has embarked on a very organic marketing strategy for online business.

Raster images replaces by SVG 

Scalable vector graphics (SVG) have gained a lot of momentum in 2015. As with high quality devices around, pixel density becomes extremely crucial for modern web designs. Scalable vector graphics have solved the problem of rasterized images and have become the most trending design trend of 2015.

Fy-out menus flew-in in 2015

Though it was not that critically acclaimed but Fly-out menu was used by a lot of websites. The collapsible menu on your computer screen is what everyone is familiar with. Moreover, this menu is not only for the mobile devices as it also beneficial for desktop computers as well. With this design the prime motive is to offer simple user experience to the users.

Conclusion

With the rising competition in the web development world, Web app development companies tend to focus more on user experience and do not  stick to any stereotypical rules. Websites have evolved and have become an integral part of the businesses in order to convey what is required. In order top render top notch products you need to match pace with the current design trends that allow you to match pace with the current design trends.

All the credit goes to the technology which enables us to get connected even in the remote corners ..Oh... now no corner remains remote. Thus in order to yield maximum out of this techsavy world you need to hop on to the current design trends as soon as possible.

Best Car Rental Tips

Today, people are increasingly going for car rental services. Whether they need to go for a vacation or have to travel from one destination to another, they choose car rental services.

Hiring a car is both easy and convenient method to commute. You can get a range of cars to choose from. You can get small cars like Indica to luxury cars like SUVs and sedans. However, you should take care of few things before approaching the car rental companies. These are:

Make Proper Search Before Renting: The very first thing that you need to do is search for various car rental companies available in the market. One option would be looking out for the local vendors working in your neighborhood, and the other option is to search online. Searching for a car rental service online is a good option as it saves time and energy, and even you can avail special discounts reserved for online customers. Online browsing gives a choice of comparing rates of different car rental companies; however, you need to take care of various factors like car size, location, hours of operation and more.

Make Advance Bookings: Hiring a car in advance is a very good idea. It is advised that you should try to make a reservation at least a month before your journey, because it becomes difficult to get an appropriate car at the last moment. Furthermore, during peak season, you end up paying more while compromising on size, vehicle choice or more, when you make a reservation at the last moment. As an icing, there are many car rental companies that offer special discounts to people making prior reservations.

Review the Rental Company and Driver's rating: When you are traveling with a hired car and a driver, it is mandatory that the driver is well behaved and trustworthy. Therefore, it becomes very important to take care of the driver's review and rating before making a reservation. You can also go through the testimonials and never hesitate to talk to the previous customers.

Get the Car Checked: if you are going out on a distant place through the car, make sure that the car you are hiring is in good condition. There are many online car rental companies that provide the complete detail of the last service done on the car. Even you can ask to check the car before renting it. Also check the accessories of the car like wipers, radio, brakes, seatbelts etc. It is also advised to check the insure coverage of the rental car. Many car rental services have limited car insurance, so if you are going for a longer time period, ask them to get the vehicle covered.

Payment and Fuel Utilization Methods: it is one of the important features that you need to take care while hiring a car rental service. There are two important ways to go about it. You can either take the vehicle as it is and refuel it before returning it to the company or you can pay for the fuel in advance. The second option is convenient and cost effective if you will be able to consume the entire tank. However, if you are travelling for the smaller distance, you should choose the first option.

It is very important that you choose a car that suits you needs and falls within your budget. Taking care of the above mentioned points, you can get a good rental car deal and can enjoy your trip.

Hosting the Olympic Games -- Is It Worth it?

Now that the world’s spotlight is lifting from Rio de Janeiro and the 2016 Summer Olympics, it is time to reflect on the economic impact the Games have on a host city. Is it worth it?

Beset with political tumult, rising crime rates and the Zika virus, Rio invested heavily in the games both in terms of actual money spent and in terms of risk to its already precarious image as a travel destination.

Back in 2009, when Rio won its bid to host the 2016 Games, the Brazilian government estimated the event would cost just under $3 billion. However, by the time the Olympic torch blazed at the opening ceremony on August 5, that number had spiraled to $4.6 billion. Over the course of the 17-day event, the increase in budget surely swelled even further.

Lest you point your finger at the Brazilians, they definitely are not alone in their initial miscalculations. The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi exceeded their original budget by 289 percent. The budget for London’s 2012 Olympics soared from around $4 billion to $15 billion.

This problem is not just a 21st century problem. Barcelona’s budget for the 1992 Games went over by 266 percent. The 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid went over budget by 324 percent, and Montreal spent about 30 years paying down its debt for the 1976 Games, which went over projected budget by a whopping 720 percent.

These figures beg the question “What happened?” How can these city officials, who have the data and the experience of other Olympic host cities to examine, keep getting it wrong?

The answer, like so many answers, lies in expectations versus reality. The Organizing Committees of the Olympic Games (OCOGs) assert that, since 1984, each city that has hosted the Olympics has broken even. How can this be? The disparity lies in the fact is that the OCOG examines only operating costs, not capital costs.

The huge capital costs of designing and building the Olympic Village, the event stadiums, the media center and other infrastructure needed for the Olympics are the greatest expenses of hosting the Games.

Then the weather and the economy can play havoc with even the most careful construction estimates. Moreover, as deadlines loom and host cities fall under intense international scrutiny to be ready for the Games, they often succumb to the pressure and, as a result, pay more than they planned.

Then there is the discrepancy of how we measure the success of hosting the Olympics? First, there are the direct financial impacts such as all the new jobs created and all the visitors to the host country.  Then there are ongoing gains spurred by the Games, such as long-term job growth and an improved infrastructure. Then there are intangible benefits, including the pride a city and a nation feel at being a host for the Games. Is the city’s future brighter as a result of hosting the Games?

While the numbers for the direct financial impact may be somewhat easy to crunch after the dust settles in Rio, these other impacts are much more subjective and much more difficult to measure.

For example, will the breathtaking views of Rio that NBC broadcast every night in its primetime coverage of the games spur more tourism to the beleaguered city?

Now that the two-week-plus extravaganza is over, will Rio find a use for the venues it built for the Games? The list of other host cities with unused or scarcely venues is long and includes Beijing's famous Bird's Nest and Water Cube (2008) and many of the structures built for the Athens games (2004).

In this research paper, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) focuses on the impact hosting the Games has on trade for the host city. Using several models, the study reveals that national exports are boosted by about 30 percent by hosting the Games.

The authors conclude that the effect on trade is related more to the positive economic signal a country sends when it bids to host the Games than to the actual act of hosting such a major event.

Allison Stewart, Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier, the authors of “The Oxford Olympics Study 2016: Cost and Cost Overrun at the Games,” which was published a month before the Rio games, discovered that the Olympics have had the highest average cost overruns of any other megaprojects. Their research found that 47 percent of Games have had cost overruns of more than 100 percent.

Given their research, the authors suggest that staging the Olympic Games is taking on one of the most financially risky endeavors that a country or a city can do, and they state in no uncertain terms that the decision can backfire.

So what is the answer? What can the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pyeongchang (2018 Winter Olympics) and Tokyo (2020 Summer Olympics) take away from the Rio games?

The IOC reportedly is considering proposals that the Olympic Games be held in several permanent locations and/or that two successive Games should be given to the same host city, so that the expensive, elaborate facilities built for the Games could be used at least twice.

As for Brazilians, it will be some time before we will see whether they are better off, worse off or just about the same as before the Summer Games. London is still sorting out is collective answer to the same question.

One of the intangibles Londoners seem to agree on, however, is the pride aspect of serving as a host city. An estimated 70,000 people volunteered their time to help the London Games run smoothly. According to londonist.com, they did so with “unfaltering cheer and good humor.” In fact, the good will associated with the London Olympics volunteers encouraged around 100,000 people to donate their time for charitable causes.

Rio faced different challenges, however. Violence and political unrest in Brazil preceding the Games prompted Brazilian soccer star Rivaldo to post a severe warning on his Instagram account last May.

The soccer superstar, who rose to international fame as the star of Brazil's national soccer team, advised his followers throughout the world to stay home, describing the tense situation in Rio as “ugly” and saying that people would be putting their lives at risk if they attended the Games in Rio.

In an interview with The Guardian last summer as Brazil, the first South American country to host the Olympics, was furiously preparing for the Games, Cláudia Uchôa, planning secretary in the Rio state government, said she hoped the legacy of the Games would ultimately be a shift in attitudes for and about Brazilian society.

Acknowledging that her multicultural country has more killings than most war zones, Uchôa said that the Olympics could help put an end to racial prejudice within her country and to help create a more tolerant global perspective toward race relations.

Are these goals too lofty for the Olympic Games, which are designed to celebrate athleticism and friendly international sports competition? Maybe.

For Brazil in general and for Rio in particular, the cost – in terms of money spent and media scrutiny delivered -- may not have been worth the advantages gained of being a host city.

No Man's Sky: A Game More of Promise Than Fulfillment

As my warp drive deactivates, my ship pulls hard out of the infinite colors of hyperspace. I'm surrounded by a bright but murky green nebula. I've never been in a star system surrounded by such a brilliant green. Space is brighter than I ever imagined it would be, brighter than any video I've seen of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, of the International Space Station's robotic arm reaching out into the black.

But this isn’t reality, I remind myself. It’s a game, albeit a fantastically large one on an unprecedented scale. My mental escape to the real world is quickly interrupted. Space pirates are scanning my ship. Already? I think to myself. I just got here!

They’ve searched my cargo hold. They like what they see. I attempt to engage my pulse drive. Perhaps I can make it to the nearest planet, which, at my current speed coming out of hyperspace, is still a painful 4 hours away. But it won’t engage. The space pirates are blocking my pulse drive. I’m panicking. It’s just a game, I remind myself. But that doesn’t stop the irrepressible feeling of dread eating away at me. A feeling that only gets worse as I see three triangular ships appear in the backdrop of space, their lime green exhaust beginning to curve in my direction.

No Man's SkyI’ve heard you can upgrade your weapons. I haven’t had the time, resources or technology to do so. I’m armed with photon cannons. I have shields. Surely the game designers did not mean for me to die so early in the game. And then I wonder, What happens if I die? It’s a bit of an existential question for a video game, yes, but a legitimate one at that. If I die, I die alone. No one will remember me. And with more than 18 quintillion worlds, chances are nobody will ever find  the worlds I named after myself. All that I’ll have to be remembered by is a fleeting moment of hubris.

It’s at that moment that the first pirate shots skip across the hull. My shields are dropping. I’m surrounded.

After what can only be described as a wait that felt nearly as infinite as its universe, No Man’s Sky, arguably 2016’s most anticipated game, was released into the hands of eager gamers. Landing on the PS4 on August 9th and PCs on August 12th, the game was waited on with bated breath for a number of reasons. In the 3 years since British developer Hello Games announced the space epic[1], fans have been trying to have a multitude of questions answered. Chief among them is one that most games have answered long before their actual release date: “What do you do in this game”?

Now that No Man’s Sky is available, we have the answer. And, almost amusingly, it’s essentially what we were told in the lead up to the game: “explore, survive, combat, and trade”. All of that happens in No Man’s Sky’s impossibly huge, procedurally generated galaxy, one that, for all intents and purposes, is far bigger than our own. Hello Games advertises its procedural generation method as capable of producing over 18 quintillion unique planets. For perspective, many estimates put our own galaxy as having a comparatively small 100 billion planets[2]. As far as variety goes, no game in the history of gaming, and likely no program in the history of programs has achieved such a feat. In that alone, No Man's Sky is a historic gaming masterpiece.

But then there’s the fact that the game is just gorgeous. Absolutely, stunningly gorgeous. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have made most game reviewers want to wax poetic when describing it. That even includes many of those giving the game mixed to negative reviews. Take these descriptions as prime examples:

Wired’s[3] Daniel Starkey writes: “No Man’s Sky is predicated on the idea that there is poetry in the knowledge that we are as lonely and as small in its computer-generated space as we are here in reality.”

The New Yorker’s[4] Simon Parkin opines: “It has been said that video games are best understood by the verbs they invite. No Man’s Sky is built on four primary actions: explore, fight, trade, survive. They are familiar verbs, for players, but, couched in the near-endless variety of this playpen, they remain brightly alluring.”

Polygon’s[5] Philip Kollar adds: “Let me tell you one spot where No Man’s Sky unequivocally succeeds, however: It is a complete technical marvel, to a degree that I cannot even begin to comprehend how it works.”

And indeed, No Man’s Sky is a programming marvel. No game[6] before it has managed to feature a universe this vast and this seamless. No Man’s Sky allows you to take off from planets, skip across a star system, and hop down onto another planet, all without the hassle of loading screens. Even in Eve Online’s[7] massive galaxy, this ability is wholly unheard of.

But reactions are, overall, mixed. Reviews are still seeping in at a much slower pace than with most games, mostly due to the game's core design. With the eventual goal to make it to the center of the galaxy and meet a mysterious, seemingly omnipotent power, many reviewers are hesitant to give the game a final score so soon. Nevertheless, No Man’s Sky currently sits at a paltry 71/100 on metacritic[8], with a horrendously low 4.9/10 average among users. While a huge mismatch between game critics' and players' reviews is common, both scores denote an almost unforgivable sense of disappointment from fans who expected something more, or at least something a bit different.

In truth, No Man’s Sky’s biggest faults reside in the repetitiveness and micromanaging that are involved. While most players expected a space simulator of some form, few expected it to feel like a space-based Minecraft. Only, without the world-building but with all of the requisite  tedium. Similarly, exploring the landscapes, which are almost unequivocally breathtaking, can still feel reminiscent to the early part of the Mass Effect Trilogy, and not in a good way.

For some gamers, such as NME’s[9] Mark Beaumont, the problem with No Man’s Sky is the very size it boasts. “These huge games are interrupting the natural rhythm of gaming life,” he writes. “Sure, games are fun to play, but the greatest satisfaction is in the beating of them, and the intervals between 'wins' are getting longer.” There is truth his statement that is impossible to ignore. And for the almost neurotic completionists among us (I thankfully do not count myself as one of those), No Man’s Sky is probably a game to be avoided. It’s a nightmare for anyone suffering from OCD. There is no end to it. Even discovering all of the hidden secrets of one of its realistically-sized worlds can take tens of hours. Multiply that by 18 quintillions, and you can easily see the problem.

Love it or hate it, No Man’s Sky is a proof of concept in many ways. Hello Games has proven, unequivocally, that you can make a game as large as our own universe. And while No Man’s Sky is far emptier than most players would prefer, with much less variety despite the fact that each planet is unique, it's the prospect for what’s possible that makes the game a huge step forward.

Undoubtedly, many developers will be looking to mimic No Man's Sky's universe, even if the game is not a commercial success. The feat Hello Games achieved would have been impossible for an older generation of video game consoles. Even my own PS4 whirs loudly at the strain the game puts on its processors. But when the next generation of consoles emerges, perhaps we will see games just as large but with much more vibrantly populated universes. Throw in the prospect of more realistic adoption and application of virtual reality, and one might begin to see that the future of gaming is much brighter than many of us realized.