The Sims widens the audience for computer games
Maxis published Will Wright's domestic life simulation on February 4, 2000. Players furnished houses and managed the moods and careers of ordinary people, with no score to chase and no way to win.
2000-2009 · 23 entries
Broadband in the living room, the store inside the machine
Broadband arrived in the living room, the shop moved inside the machine, and a telephone became the most important game device on earth.
What was happening
The console became a household appliance in this decade rather than a toy in a child's bedroom. The generation's dominant machine also played films on disc, at a price that compared well against a standalone player, so it entered living rooms as a media purchase that happened to run games, and it sold in quantities no console had reached before. That changed the arithmetic of development. Budgets grew because the audience was finally large enough to support them, teams grew along with the budgets, and a business that had once aimed a good cartridge at a hobbyist niche began planning around millions of units and multi-year schedules.
Online play stopped being an enthusiast's project. One company arrived from the computer industry with a hard drive and a network port as standard equipment, then built a paid service around a single identity, a friends list, matchmaking and voice chat, and insisted that games use it consistently. The decision to charge for the privilege looked odd at the time and turned out to be enormously profitable, because it converted a one-time hardware sale into a continuing relationship. Sitting in an American living room and arguing with a stranger three states away became completely ordinary, and platform holders now had a powerful reason to keep players inside their own walls.
Personal computers went through a quieter but more consequential change. One studio built a delivery and patching system for its own multiplayer titles, then required an account even for boxed copies of its next major release, a condition readers resented at the time and largely accepted within a few years. That system soon became the main storefront for computer games, and the shelf that mattered was no longer in a shop at all. For small developers the effect was liberating. For everyone it moved the decisive power over what reached players from retail buyers to platform operators, a shift the industry is still arguing about today.
Meanwhile the business rediscovered the people it had spent twenty years ignoring. A domestic life simulation with no way to win became the best-selling computer game of its era, largely by appealing to an audience the trade had assumed did not exist. One company took the same lesson into hardware, first with a handheld built around a touch screen and software about training your memory or looking after a pet, then with a home console that traded raw processing power for a motion-sensing remote and a collection of sports anyone could pick up. Plastic guitars filled living rooms until the market saturated, which was its own useful lesson.
The decade's most important object was not a console at all. A telephone released in 2007 put a responsive touch screen, motion sensors and real graphics hardware into ordinary pockets, and the store that opened for it a year later handed any developer worldwide distribution and payment collection. Prices fell toward a dollar or nothing, volume replaced margin, and a second industry grew up alongside the old one with different assumptions about almost everything. Console download services were teaching a parallel lesson: a team of two could reach millions of players without a publisher. By the time the financial crisis arrived, the ground had already shifted.
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Subscription as infrastructure
Charging for console online access was the decade's most quietly influential business decision. It funded the servers, matchmaking and moderation that made multiplayer reliable, and it gave platform owners recurring revenue independent of hardware cycles. It also established the idea that part of what you buy with a console is continuing membership, which every later subscription and cloud service was built on top of.
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Widening the audience
Touch screens, motion controls, life simulations and music peripherals brought in players the industry had long treated as impossible to reach: parents, grandparents, whole households at once. The commercial results were spectacular and the follow-through was uneven, since much of the software aimed at these players was thin. But the demographic argument was settled permanently in these years.
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A dollar per game
Mobile storefronts inverted the economics of pricing. With global distribution, no manufacturing and no shelf space, a developer could sell enormous quantities at almost nothing per copy, or give the game away and charge later. Established publishers read this as a low-value market at first. Within a few years it was carrying the largest playing audience in the world.
Watch for these as you read
- broadband consoles
- digital storefronts
- motion and touch
- app store economics
- high-definition budgets
Narrow the record
2000-2009 Entries in order
The PlayStation 2 arrives as a console and a DVD player
Sony's second console reached Japanese buyers on March 4, 2000. It played original PlayStation discs, doubled as a DVD player at a competitive price, and went on to become the best-selling home console ever made.
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Sega gives up on building consoles and turns to publishing
After years of losses, Sega confirmed on January 31, 2001 that it would stop making the Dreamcast and sell its games on other companies' machines. A hardware rivalry that had defined the previous decade ended.
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The Game Boy Advance puts 16-bit console power in a pocket
Nintendo's new handheld went on sale in Japan on March 21, 2001, with a wide color screen and a 32-bit processor. It handled the kind of games that had required a home console ten years earlier.
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Nintendo answers with the GameCube and a proprietary disc
Optical discs, in a small proprietary format, replaced cartridges when Nintendo's fourth home console reached Japan on September 14, 2001. Housed in a compact box with a carrying handle, it was capable but finished third in its generation.
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Microsoft enters the console business with a shooter as its anchor
Microsoft's first console went on sale in North America on November 15, 2001, with a hard drive, an Ethernet port and Halo: Combat Evolved, the game that gave it an identity.
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Xbox Live turns online play into a routine console feature
A paid network service opened in North America on November 15, 2002, one year after Microsoft's console. It combined a persistent identity, friends lists, matchmaking and voice chat, all designed for broadband.
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Valve launches Steam and starts moving games off shelves
Valve released Steam on September 12, 2003, at first as a way to patch its own multiplayer games and combat cheating. It grew into the dominant storefront for computer games.
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A phone maker builds a handheld console and misreads the market
Nokia put the N-Gage on sale on October 7, 2003: a mobile phone shaped like a game handheld, with cartridges and online play. It sold poorly and was withdrawn within a few years.
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A boxed blockbuster requires an online account to play
Half-Life 2 shipped on November 16, 2004 with mandatory Steam activation, even for copies bought on disc. The requirement angered many buyers and quietly established account-based ownership as the norm.
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Two screens and a stylus reshape the handheld
Nintendo released the DS in North America on November 21, 2004, with a touch-sensitive lower screen, a microphone and local wireless play. It became one of the best-selling systems ever made.
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World of Warcraft carries online worlds into the mainstream
Blizzard opened World of Warcraft on November 23, 2004. Forgiving solo progression, a familiar setting and unusually reliable service pulled a genre that had been niche into the cultural mainstream.
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Sony brings console-grade graphics to a pocket machine
Sony's PlayStation Portable reached North American stores on March 24, 2005. A wide bright screen, proprietary optical discs and music and video playback made it the first credible challenger to Nintendo in years.
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A plastic guitar starts a boom in rhythm games
Harmonix and RedOctane released Guitar Hero on November 8, 2005, packaged with a guitar-shaped controller and a set list of licensed rock songs. Living rooms filled with plastic instruments for the next several years.
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The Xbox 360 opens the high-definition console generation early
Microsoft put the Xbox 360 on sale in North America on November 22, 2005, a full year before its competitors. High-definition output, a mature online service and a digital marketplace defined it.
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The PlayStation 3 costs too much and recovers slowly
Sony's third console launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, carrying a Blu-ray drive and an unusual processor. A steep price and difficult development tools cost it years before it recovered.
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Motion control sells a console to people who never bought one
Motion control arrived in North American stores on November 19, 2006. Nintendo's Wii shipped with a remote that sensed movement and a pack-in sports collection, and it reached households that had never wanted a console.
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Apple's phone quietly becomes the most common game machine
Apple's first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. It had no game store and few games, yet it created the device category that would carry the largest gaming audience in the world.
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Portal shows how much a short game can accomplish
Included in a multi-game bundle released on October 10, 2007, Portal grew out of a student project. It taught its own spatial rules entirely through level design and finished in a few hours.
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An app store rewires the economics of making games
Apple's App Store opened on July 10, 2008, giving any developer a route to a global audience with payment handled automatically. Games dominated it almost immediately, at prices the industry had never contemplated.
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Download stores put small studios in front of console owners
Braid appeared on Microsoft's download service on August 6, 2008, alongside other small titles that summer. Tiny teams reached millions of console owners without a publisher, a retailer or a shelf.
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An unfinished game goes on sale and keeps growing
Markus Persson published the earliest public versions of Minecraft on May 17, 2009 and went on selling and updating it while it was still being built. Players spread it themselves, largely through video.
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Angry Birds turns casual mobile play into a household habit
Angry Birds reached Apple devices in December 2009. Rovio's simple physics puzzles, sold at a low price with an instantly recognizable cast, became the reference point for what a mobile hit looked like.
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What the period left behind
The 2000s moved the industry's center of gravity twice over. Play moved online and stayed there, and buying moved from a shelf to an account. Both shifts handed enormous leverage to whoever operated the platform, and both are why a very small team could suddenly reach millions of people without permission from a retailer. The decade ended with the largest audience in the medium's history sitting in people's pockets, barely noticed by the existing trade.