2010-2019 · 24 entries
The decade games stopped being products you finished buying and became services you kept coming back to.
Follow the money through the 2010s and it leads to a telephone. Free downloads paid for by a minority of players buying items or advantages became the dominant commercial form of the decade, first on mobile and then very nearly everywhere, and it changed what a game structurally is. Not a finished product sold once, but a service that has to keep an audience returning, measured daily, updated indefinitely and designed around retention. A shooter that gave away its main mode and sold nothing but cosmetics became one of the most profitable entertainment products ever released, and a place where teenagers arranged to meet whether or not they intended to play.
Watching became as important as playing. A live-streaming service spun out of a general video site in 2011 and grew into an industry of its own, then was bought by a retailer for close to a billion dollars, which settled any remaining question about whether game video was a serious media asset. The consequences reached well beyond entertainment. Discovery moved from magazines and store shelves to whoever a viewer happened to trust on camera, an entire category of career appeared where none had existed, and competitive play finally acquired the audience it needed to support salaries, leagues and eventually filled arenas.
Hardware strategy converged. Both of the major consoles of the generation used processor architecture borrowed from personal computers, which made building for every platform far less painful and quietly ended the era of exotic console chips. One of the two launched badly, having announced restrictions on used games and always-connected checks and then reversed them under public pressure, an early demonstration that a platform's own audience could veto policy. A third company, after a commercial failure, merged its handheld and home lines into a single tablet that docked to a television. Virtual reality returned as well, this time built on cheap phone displays and sensors and backed by serious money.
The market pulled apart at both ends. At the top, one open-world crime game earned around a billion dollars within days of release, and blockbuster budgets and campaigns began to resemble those of major films, complete with the same intolerance of risk. At the bottom, the barriers simply fell away. Crowdfunding let players finance a game before it existed, paid early access let a developer sell an unfinished one honestly, and the block-building sandbox that came out of that approach became the best-selling game ever made and a standard tool in classrooms. A wordless downloadable title won awards that used to go to spectacles.
Two kinds of recognition arrived. In 2011 the Supreme Court held that games are speech fully protected by the First Amendment, ending two decades of legislative attempts to restrict their sale, and awards, museum exhibitions and serious criticism gradually followed. The other kind was far less comfortable. Reporting on the hours worked inside prestige studios made crunch a labor issue rather than a craft anecdote, and it fed organizing efforts that grew in the years afterward. Consolidation was quietly building the whole time. The decade closed with a technology company streaming games out of data centers and asking whether owning hardware was necessary at all.
Removing the purchase price changed design as much as business. If anyone can try a game, the work of persuasion moves inside it, into progression, daily rewards, social pressure and things worth paying for later. Done well this funded years of updates for players who never spent anything. Done badly it produced systems that were criticized, and in some countries regulated, as gambling.
Live streaming turned an audience into a market. Viewers who never bought a game still shaped its success, since visibility on a popular channel could matter more than any advertisement. Chat made the viewing social, personalities became the industry's most effective promotion, and a generation began forming its taste in games from watching other people play them.
The decade rewarded the very large and the very small while squeezing everything between them. Enormous productions could absorb enormous marketing, and tiny teams could reach an audience directly through digital stores. Mid-sized studios with mid-sized budgets found the least room to work, a pattern that became painfully visible when the industry contracted a few years later.
Microsoft's depth-sensing camera for the Xbox 360 read body movement and spoken commands with nothing held or worn. It sold at record speed, then struggled to find games that justified the hardware.
The successor to the DS put a stereoscopic display in a clamshell portable that needed no glasses. A thin launch line-up forced an unusually early price cut before software turned the system around.
A general-purpose live video site spun its busiest section, the gaming channels, into a separate service. Broadcasting play with a chat window running beside it grew into an industry of its own.
In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association the United States Supreme Court struck down a California statute restricting sales of violent games to minors, holding that games qualify for full constitutional protection as expression.
Two years of paid public development ended with a version numbered as complete, announced on stage at a gathering of players. Updates never actually stopped, and ports carried the game onto nearly every screen.
An established studio asked players directly to fund an adventure game that publishers would not back. The campaign passed its target within hours and finished with several million dollars from tens of thousands of backers.
A short game about walking toward a distant mountain paired players anonymously, with no names, no chat and no dialogue. Awards and mainstream coverage followed, strengthening long-running arguments about games as art.
A campaign aimed at developers rather than consumers funded a rough head-mounted display built from inexpensive phone parts. It brought money, talent and attention back to a field the industry had written off.
Rockstar's crime epic took in around a billion dollars in its first three days, a figure comparable to the biggest openings in film. Games were now unambiguously a top-tier entertainment business.
Sony abandoned exotic processors for ordinary computer components, priced the console a hundred dollars below its rival and stated plainly that used discs and offline play would work. The generation was effectively decided early.
Microsoft presented its console as a living room media hub, then withdrew announced rules on periodic online checks and used discs after sustained criticism. A higher price and a bundled camera slowed it for years.
Facebook agreed to purchase Oculus for roughly two billion dollars, describing headsets as a future computing platform rather than a game accessory. The deal transformed the field's funding and unsettled many of its early supporters.
The live game streaming service was bought by Amazon for close to a billion dollars, after reported interest from Google. Watching other people play had become an asset worth competing for at that scale.
After years of refusing to license its characters to phones, Nintendo announced a development partnership with DeNA. The last major holdout had accepted smartphones as a legitimate place for its franchises.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt combined a very large open world with side quests written to the standard of its main story. Its success proved Central and Eastern European studios could compete at the highest level.
The first consumer Oculus Rift shipped in late March 2016 and the HTC Vive, with room-scale tracking and motion controllers, arrived days later. Working virtual reality was on sale after decades of false starts.
Niantic and The Pokemon Company placed collectible creatures at real map coordinates, so playing required walking outdoors. Crowds formed in parks and public squares worldwide within days of release.
PlayStation VR worked with an ordinary PlayStation 4 and a camera instead of a high-end computer. It became the best-selling headset of its generation and reached households with no interest in gaming computers.
Nintendo released a tablet that slides into a dock to play on a television, with detachable controllers and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at launch. Its separate hardware lines merged into one.
A hundred players parachute onto an island, scavenge weapons and fight until one remains, inside a boundary that keeps shrinking. Sold unfinished, it reached tens of millions of players within a year.
Epic Games added a free battle royale mode to an existing survival game, then layered on building, cross-platform play and cosmetic purchases. In-game concerts and events turned it into a hangout for young players.
A western epic about a fading outlaw gang sold enormously and drew praise for the density of its simulated world. Reporting on the long hours worked during production made working conditions a central industry conversation.
Apple opened a curated subscription library of games with no advertising and no in-app purchases, playable across its devices for a flat monthly fee. Developers gained an alternative to free-to-play economics.
Stadia ran games on remote servers and delivered video to browsers, phones and televisions, with no local hardware needed. The technology largely worked; the library, the purchase model and confidence in the company did not.
If the 2000s built the pipes, the 2010s decided what would flow through them: continuous services, sold in pieces, watched by more people than actually played them. The decade made games unavoidable in mainstream culture and firmly protected as expression, while exposing what the working conditions behind the biggest ones really were. Both of those inheritances, the reach and the labor question, are what the current decade is still arguing over.
