Broadband in the living room, the store inside the machine

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.