Games become services, and audiences become viewers

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.