Looking back at what the last ten years have meant for video games

so 10 years have come and gone and the video game industry has changed I always think the end of a decade makes for a good time to look back and reflect the changes we don't like this in a single year can become stark over the passage of 10 as the endless march of progress forges on but the progress of the 2010s isn't so much that of the technological growth which so characterized previous decades for the industry that instead more one of evolving markets and shifting economies and this progress has come with some downsides so the last 10 years have been a little bit tumultuous it's been a decade of highs and lows of successes and failures and the fall of one thing that's been met by the rise of another so join me for a trip down memory lane as we look back at the decades in video games before we get to this decades I feel we need to set the scene so let's go back another 10 years to look at the start of the previous one 2000 and 2001 saw the release of be sick console generation which saw new advancements like the utilisation of online services as well as a big step up for graphics and of course lots of good games just take a look at this advert from Sony for their 2001 holiday lineup of exclusive games this is one part of one year for one console and just the games shown here are pretty incredible these were games that changed gaming Grand Theft Auto free completely reinvented the open world genre and his legacy is still being felt today Metal Gear Solid 2 remains one of the most memorable narrative experiences you'll find in a game Silent Hill 2 could easily be considered as the greatest horror game ever made Devil May Cry again spawned its own genre that still has many die and bands today and I could go on here it's also worth noting that other consoles had their own important games in 2001 Xbox pads halo the Gamecube had super smash bros melee and so on these were big-budget games with high production values and the range of different things and overall level of quality of what was on offer was fantastic and when you compare pretty much any year of the early 2000s with pretty much any year from this past decade there's a clear difference once upon a time big-budget games were usually good and now they're often disappointing once upon a time gamers seemed pretty content with triple-a gaming and now they're not and once upon a time mainstream gaming was great and now it isn't but don't just take my word for it I have evidence first up what about the critical reception of games from these periods let's take two years from the start of the last decade two thousand and one and two and two from the end of this decade 2017 and 18 and compare how many games got a Metacritic score of 90 and above for 2001 there are 38 games for 2002 there are 35 and this is excluding ports and only counting a game once even if it's listed for multiple consoles so 38 and 35 sounds fairly impressive but 2017 was a decent year for games so how does it compare well continuing the rules of excluding ports there are seven games with a critic score of 90 or higher for 2007 and 7 again for 2018 which is a pretty big difference if you think I'm cherry picking the years here I'm not in fact 2019 seems to have only four but feel free to check this all yourself and if you're curious how the start of the last decade compares its maybe unsurprisingly somewhere in between but maybe you could say critics are done and don't know what they're talking about or maybe you could argue standards have changed in review scores so let's look at something else if you don't want to rely on the word of critics why not look at user scores I can't find a nice pre-made table presenting this information so I guess I'll have to make one myself so let's take the 10 biggest gains by sales from 2001 and 2 and compare their user scores to the 10 biggest games from 2018 and 19 these are my sources and these are the results from an average of eight point one and eight point six in 2001 and two to six point four in 2018 and four point nine in 2019 so just as before there is a pretty clear difference if you are still not convinced then I don't know I think that's on you because I made an excel charts and as we all know bread is a lot worse than green also there's only so much time I can spend on this section of the video because really the best evidence is the games themselves and when you compare this decades of previous decades there's just less classics than there used to be it's not the good games that exist anymore it's just that they feel rarer but you need to actually search for them and that you can't rely on the fact that a game has a big budget or a well-known publisher as any kind of indication of quality and when looking at the last decade as a whole and thinking about what's changed and what sets this decade apart from what came before this is one of the most prominent things triple-a titles mainstream gaming large publishers they're all failing to deliver and people are taking note of this with B animosity from consumers towards producers steadily increasing as the decade has rolled on so why has this happened well firstly technological progress isn't what it used to be compare the graphical improvements of the 90s or 2000s with that of the 2010s and the difference speaks for itself the previous decades Grand Theft Auto going from this to this and that's quite the leap forward enough to make the jump from GTA 4 to 5 seemed pretty lackluster 10 years is a long time but rather than bringing a complete graphical transformation it's only brought very gradual improvements once upon a time the jump from say Metal Gear Solid 1 to Metal Gear Solid 2 blew my mind I genuinely couldn't believe games look this good and these two games released only three years apart but now over the course of three years I feel like I barely notice a difference because the speed at which graphics and technology has improved has slowed considerably and now games can't rely on technological advancements - Wow players or make a sequel feel like a sequel and even though improvements in technology have slowed that costs of making a game have done anything but as game technology has got bigger and better so too has its demands let's compare some beloved Nintendo classics from back in the day like Super Mario World and super metroids through some of the impressive games of recent years both Super Mario World and Super Metroid took around two years to develop we have Super Mario World being developed by a staff of 10 and super metroids having 15 that seems quite modest but hey they were able to make some good games that still hold up well today but now let's look at some recent triple-a titles like God of War and Red Dead Redemption - both took around 5 years to develop with 300 people reportedly working on a God of War and a colossal 2,000 people working on Red Dead Redemption - something that seems extreme even by modern standards but if any modern game has come close to wiring graphically then I guess it is Red Dead Redemption - so maybe that's what it takes these days regardless the cost of employing hundreds let alone thousands of people for several years on top of every other business expense is not going to be a small amount modern game development is expensive and as the years have went by that's how you become more and more true and if making big triple-a games is going to have such a high cost then that's going to have other effects the first of which is that game publishers are going to look for ways to mitigate those costs by increasing a game's revenue like by making downloadable content to reuse assets or adding microtransactions to allow players to buy optional cosmetic items convenience items and pay2win improvements for their character or by also following the wisdom of the gambling industry to introduce exciting luck-based reward systems for players willing to drop some coin in the form of loot boxes and this is probably the biggest reason for why the user scores have so many high selling modern games have fallen quite so low while at the start of the decade micro transactions were rare these days if a big-budget game has multiplayer it's going to have micro transactions and there's a good chance but these will feature pay2win elements as the boundaries for what people considered acceptable have continually been pushed further and further by modern video games perhaps the best known example of this was Electronic Arts Star Wars Battlefront 2 which released in 2017 and was the game that finally went too far by featuring both pay to win upgrades as well as excessively long grinds to unlock hero characters without the player splashing some cash about not only did this make players unhappy that's unhappiness also caused a media frenzy resulting in EA share price dropping by 2.5 percent on the game's launch despite this Star Wars Battlefront 2 was still one of the best-selling games of the year while the boundaries of acceptability were stretched ever further as what was once considered outrageous became increasingly normalized perhaps even more surprising is the successful introduction of micro transactions into single player games at least when it comes to multiplayer games micro transactions were a thing before this decade began and looking back their growth seemed somewhat inevitable cash stores in single player games however or something a lot of people didn't see coming and yet here we are things may have started with optional cosmetics but they didn't stop there as shown by ubisoft's flagship series assassin's creed where the latest installment combined growing the RPG systems with optional boosts for the player to purchase for people not used to the idea of micro transactions in single player games stuff like this feels rather unpalatable but maybe it's good to get used to the taste now because this seems like a thing that will continue in the future unless something drastic happens to the costs of game development or the mentality of publishers but it doesn't stop there cash stores and loot boxes get a lot of attention but they aren't the only consequence of modern games modern costs there's also been a clear change in what type of game gets made in the past you can look at the big releases of a year and see a wide range of different genres and spirals let's go back to that image of the PlayStation 2 2001 holiday lineup here we have a flight sim an action RPG a hyper time completely original hack-and-slash action game a turn-based RPG a racing game a again completely original open-world sandbox game a puzzle adventure game a platformer a stealth game and a survival horror game and there isn't just a range of genres here these games have completely different styles tones and a design for radically different audiences and it's not just that there were more genres on offer games were also willing to be weirder to be more experimental and to take real risks you have games like Katamari Damacy and killer7 and Shadow of the Colossus and these weren't treated as weird low-budget indie games these titles sat on game store shelves alongside everything else as equals and they had the high production values and established publishers and everything else they needed to really be equals but by the start of the last decade this was already starting to change and this has only become true as the decade continued because the greater the cost of making games the greater the risk if they're unsuccessful and so big-budget games have become safer and safer and so there's a smaller range of genres a more benign selection of settings an ever-expanding desire to design games to hold the players hand in case they get lost or stuck and a greater reluctance to try out anything new or original or innovative generally speaking most big-budget games only get made if they're part of an existing series or franchise everything has to be a sequel or a reboot and the only exceptions are games designed around following what sells as closely as possible which at the moment seems to be action gameplay light RPG mechanics and either an open-world or something more linear that's cinematic and narrative heavy I mentioned reboots there so I guess I should also talk about the rest of the four hours of the gaming apocalypse reboots re-releases remasters and remakes and the 2010s have seen these four hours run rampant because if you're worried about the economic risk of game development well it doesn't get much safer than literally just sticking with what worked in the past so in 2019 we have one of the four games with a Metacritic score of over 90 being a remake of Resident Evil 2 one of Nintendo's biggest releases of the year being a remake of The Legend of zelda links awakening one of the biggest MMO events of the entire decades being a re-release of world of warcraft and one of the biggest realtime strategy games to be released in years being a HD remaster of Age of Empires to keep in mind we already had one HD remaster of this guy already this decade which was released in 2013 so this is the second rerelease really release if you like but Age of Empires 2 wasn't nearly two-timer these last 10 years Shadow of the Colossus had a HD remaster released in 2011 and then a full remake in 2018 and Goldeneye Double A seven Metal Gear Solid 3 Katherine and rockstars bully was all technically count as members of the two-time Club as well there were also many games released in the last decade which have already seen remasters such as Assassin's Creed 3 and Brotherhood and revelations Bioshock 2 Batman Arkham City Dark Souls Darksiders 2 Dead Rising 2 DMC Devil May Cry Donkey Kong Country Returns and we're four letters into the alphabet and this list is already getting pretty long so I guess we'll just say and many many others 2020 looks to continue this trend with many remasters already being announced the biggest game of January looking likely to be Warcraft free reforged and one of the biggest games of the year likely being the Final Fantasy 7 remake as forever all these reboots re-releases remasters and remakes are really a sign of the gaming apocalypse well I guess they're not but they are one of the big changes that the 2010s have brought and they are clearly a sign of the times where original content is seen as risky often too risky the quality of all these remasters and remakes is also questionable it's hard to begrudge a genuinely well-made remake of a classic game or attempts to allow modern audiences easier access to older titles but there have also been plenty of bands remasters some borderline terrible as well as some questionable new additions and changes and even if there is real value in good remasters and good remakes it's still hard not to miss the times when the gaming industry was just more original innovative and experimental the new technologies of the 2010s also haven't really seemed all that transformative we've seen attempts at augmented reality with Pokemon go free be gaming with the Nintendo 3ds and cloud gaming with services like on live at the start of the decade and Google stadia at the end of it and none of these have felt that important and then there's the biggest no-show of the 2010s Virtual Reality the technology of the future and I guess it's a good thing that it is the technology of the future because no one seems to care very much in the presence that hey maybe things will change in the next decade and maybe that's true for the other technology debutant - but if you compare this to the 2000s which saw motion controls become a really big deal as well as the introduction of touchscreens and the start of online services for consoles that made online multiplayer mainstream then the new technologies of the 2010s feel were little unimpressive it's as if we've barely begun to see that true potential and it also feels like future technologies aren't going to explode onto the gaming world with a bang anymore and instead seem to face a slow crawl to being successful which may or may not even get there and all in all that's just one less thing to be excited about so over the last decade technological progress has slowed video games have continually increased in costs and developers and publishers have looked at other ways of generating revenue while also looking to create safer and safer products and so over the course of the last 10 years it's hard not to feel that something has been lost within the industry there are less classics less optimism around big-budget games less diversity in those game types and an overall sense that things were just better in the past but the glory days are gone and that things will only get worse or at least that would be the case if it wasn't for a different sides of the gaming industry in 2008 Xbox launched their Xbox Live summer of Arcade initiative where during one summer month five indie games were released exclusively on Xbox is virtual store this was a smart move by Microsoft because it encouraged console gamers to start to transition to buying games digitally at a time when console gamers were used to only buying physical copies however this was also an important moment for the indie scene because the way this was marketed as a big exclusive event created a spotlight on some games that wouldn't have got that kind of attention otherwise and there were some damn good games that featured in this summer of arcades the first year saw the likes of braid Castle Crashers and Bionic Commando rearmed and this was followed by games like Shadow Complex Trials HD limbo Bastian and many many others and suddenly it felt like indie games were legitimized I mean there were plenty of other factors and things along the way the rise of digital distribution pretty much went side by side with the rise of indie gaming and there was also an important role played by those early breakout success stories like Cave Story but at least in my eyes 2008 summer of arcades felt like the start of something it was when people took notice when you started see indie games make it into people's games of the Year lists and when people started to look at indie games as this separate parts of gaming for the mainstream Xboxes summer of arcade was initially a big success and yet it was stopped after 2013 because it just wasn't needed anymore I mean that's not the official reason from Microsoft I can't actually finds an official reason but come on that's the reason in 2008 indie games needed exclusivity and a specific month of the year dedicated them to get people to pay attention but in 2013 they didn't by 2013 indie games could come out all year round on all sorts of different platforms and they'd be played by all sorts of different people and they haven't slowed down since around the mid 2010's there was talk of a saturation in the indie game industry the term in the apocalypse was thrown around a lot although we still seem to be waiting for that apocalypse that actually happened so that doesn't seem a very accurate descriptor but a saturation seems pretty fair over the last 10 years the indie scene has flourished which has meant more and more games and so more and more competition if you're an indie developer who gave up your day job to chase the indie dream and who put all their capital into their beloved indie project then the idea of in desaturation might be pretty disconcerting maybe it keeps you up at night and it makes you question your life choices but I'm not a developer I'm a consumer and if saturation means being spoiled for choice for so many good games you don't have time to play them all then [ __ ] give me some more about saturation because it doesn't seem so bad from where I'm standing there have been a lot of good indie games this last decades and the rise of digital distribution has been the main reason that this has happened but it's not the only reason the 2010s also saw the emergence of crowdfunding thanks largely to the growth of Kickstarter Kickstarter was a platform which allowed craters to pitch their projects directly to their target audience as a means of securing funding through donations thanks to some big names like Double Fine productions an obsidian entertainment Kickstarter garnered a lot of attention in the gaming industry and with its promises to cut out publishers to allow more creative freedom and take gaming back to his glory days it turned out to have a message that resonated with a lot of people throw in some cleverly crafted nostalgia where big-name titles of the past or big-name people of the past where name dropped and attached to projects and you can start to see how some of these pitches amassed millions in pledges so it was a time when people were longing for the past and funding developers directly did make some sense and so a lot of games were crowd funded this last decade and Kickstarter produced some huge successes as well as a few notable failures but most importantly crowdfunding allowed for many games to be made which otherwise wouldn't have been and while crowdfunding in video games seems to have peaked towards the start of the last decade there are still crowd funded games coming out today but if you really want to see the success and importance of crowdfunding on the last decade why not look at one of the smaller Kickstarter campaigns for a game that only asked for a modest five thousand dollars called undertale undertale was developed almost entirely by one guy a guy who learned how to develop games through RPG maker and whose game almost looked like it could have been made in RPG maker but undertale wasn't just a big success it was the indie dream personified it was a passion project made by one guy with limited funding or experience which went on to become a gaming phenomenon and will leave a legacy remembered for years to come for that reason undertale has to be considered one of the most important games of the decade and it was financed entirely through crowdfunding another important thing which happened this decade was early access where developers decided why bother waiting to release a finished game when you can just release a unfinished game and still make people pay for it sounds like a bulletproof plan to me for the developer that is I mean there might be a slight potential problem for consumers which is that developers will receive players money but have no actual obligation to finish the game but I'm sure that would never have oh oh dear so early access had its downside and there was a lot of garbage early access titles as a result but it's also allowed for the ongoing development of games where community feedback could be incorporated by developers as the game was being developed this has its advantages particularly for indie developers who might struggle to test their game or incorporate player feedback prior to release otherwise early access also allowed for some really creative and ambitious projects one personal favorite of mine was kenchi a game that started development in 2008 was released to early access in 2013 and then came out of early access at the end of 2018 almost six years later and I don't know if you could quite describe this game as completely finished but it's still great and unlike anything I've played before and it's exactly the type of game that wouldn't have been made without early access ie it's far too ambitious for its only good but thanks to early access it works other success stories of early access includes the entire survival genre which gave us games like dayz which gave us genres like battle royale which gave us games like fortnight and I guess that's kind of a big deal but the biggest thing to come out of early access and another game that surely has to be considered as one of the most important of the decades was minecraft first released in 2009 a time before the term early access have even been popularized minecraft was another game which initially came from a single person deciding to do their own thing and minecraft is the best-selling game of all time and while it might have been bought up by Microsoft a while ago it also alerts and felts a hundred percent like an indie game minecraft is a pretty good representation of what the last decade has been about the fall from grace of the mainstream and its replacement by other things we have just come to the end of 2019 and 2019 wasn't a particularly good year for Triple A games but it was a good year for indie games and that statement feels like it could be applied to most of the last 10 years where mainstream gaming has been forced by changing economies to play it safe the indie scene has instead bask in the creative freedom that a smaller budget affords its creator where mainstream game has clung tightly to its established series and franchises the indie scene often doesn't have a choice to do anything but to create something original and where mainstream gaming has abandoned the majority of genres the indie scene can except take advantage of these new gaps in the market or just creates entirely new genres and so the fall of one part of the industry has meant the rise of another and as good as I think the past was I'm not even sure I'd want to go back because the sheer amount of choice today is unrivaled and thanks to the internet finding good games is easy even titles with small budgets and no marketing can become popular in the modern climates thanks to the platform provided by the internet to offer exposure to games that deserve it this isn't exactly something that happens evenly or proportionally but it does happen I wonder how many people would have played pathologic to this year if it wasn't for a couple of video reviews by one youtuber who in a relative sense isn't even that big the Internet has helped to facilitate this indie gaming Renaissance but if we're talking about the decade in games I guess we also have to admit the Internet's was a lot more than just that these past 10 years [Music] so the Internet is a thing and that means something for games and you know it was a thing last decade too but now it's like really a thing so I guess we have to talk about that the last decades has seen the Internet Brian importance with the number of people with internet access increasing the number of people using social media increasing and the number of people consuming video game related contents also unsurprisingly increasing do you want your new game to sell well maybe you should spend less money on buying adverts and stop worrying about traditional games media and instead focus your attention on paying twitch streamers and YouTube let's players because that kind of digital marketing has become pretty important now and a lot of the breakout success stories of these past years particularly for indie games have come about because of the exposure these games have received on platforms like YouTube and twitch but there's more to twitch and YouTube than just being new spaces for marketing it turns out lots of people like watching other people play games and the rise of this kind of content has had an effect on gaming culture what's more competitive gaming in the form of eSports has also exploded in popularity and is now seen as a fairly legitimate thing it gets millions of views a years it makes people huge amounts of money and it's even shows up on regular TV seeing video games on ESPN might have seemed pretty weird at the start of a decade but by the end of it it seems pretty normal the Internet has also facilitated the rise of freemium games Bo's which are free-to-play and make money through cash shops and other types of micro transactions if you want to know where triple-a gaming got their ideas from well it was directly because of the success of this type of business model and these days freemium games make up a pretty big portion of the gaming industry overall revenue and as much as you may personally wish it wasn't so the 2010s will also the decades in which video games and their political voice as an ever-expanding culture war spread across the internet video games became one of its hottest battlegrounds culminating in 2014's gamergate an event of such earth-shaking significance that we may never get to the point that online news outlets actually stopped writing articles trying to milk it for every click it's worth gamergate set the fires of internet political discourse of burning and as we all know fires aren't always that easy to put out and so particularly for games media it's been a decade of arguing about politics but it was also a decade in which games started to become overtly and deliberately political in their content messages and representation and people have had a lot to say about that like positive and negative in fact they continue to have a lot to say about that and so it seems like video games will continue to be a political battlegrounds moving into the next decade and so as the Internet has grown in importance so too has its impact on video games and video game culture and while mainstream gaming has faltered and indie games have risen the Internet has sat in the backgrounds like a puppet master pulling the strings of change so what does all this mean I feel like being all doom and gloom and pessimistic about everything is a popular thing for people to do on the Internet and I can be do me and gloomy and I can say everything is terrible now and talk about the good old days when video games were better but really deep down I'm not sure I actually believe this decades has been that banned for video games and I don't really think the end of the decade is a worse time than the start of it so mainstream gaming is a hollow shell of what it was in the 90s or the early or mid 2000s and there are fewer goods big-budget games and fewer greats big-budget games and what there is feels more formulaic more safe more similar but maybe that makes the games that the finest stand out even more there are still those big-budget games that do feel different that offer something new or just feel so high quality but you can't help but be impressed and there have been games that feel like they deliberately go against the grain the 2010s were a decade where mainstream gaming became obsessed with making everything cinematic and we've always holding the player's hand and making games easy to understand and difficult to fail and so it seems fitting that one of the most successful and influential games this decade was Dark Souls a title that did the complete opposite of all these things and if I had to pick a game at the decade it would be this one because Dark Souls and other titles released by from software these past years weren't just well made and enjoyable games they represented a complete defiance towards what mainstream gaming was meant to be and it resulted in a series of games that resonated with players like few others that spawned their own genre and countless imitators which still keep coming out today and which you know will continue to be a big influence on the gaming industry in the years to come so great games legendary games even still exist and mainstream gaming has also been indie gaming's game there are more games than ever before more choice more variety and I think what really separates this decade from what came before in my eyes is that the burden to find good games and fine games that appeal to your specific tastes is on you now you can't just walk into your local game store and pick up a few of the top selling games and expect to find anything really memorable you can't once upon a time but times change and now if you want to find good games you'll have to search for them yourself but we'd be internets doing this is easier than ever before you now have easy access to digital distribution and easy to find information of our huge numbers of games so the burden to find these good games yourself doesn't seem unreasonable and while we're on the subject of consumer responsibility it also bears repeating that if you aren't happy with the state of modern mainstream gaming and modern publishers it still doesn't mean anything unless your words are backed up with actions it doesn't matter how many Jim sterling videos you watch this year or how many angry posts you upvoted on reddit if you still go out and get these companies you dislike money star wars battlefront 2 had the most downloaded post in reddit's history and it also sold millions of copies and which of these things do you think EA cares more about so I guess we should end this wall with a suitably cliched message but the future is in your hands or something like that but really good games are out there so make sure you don't overlook them you

Channel: NeverKnowsBest

Views: 118,674

Keywords: video games, decade in review games, 2010s games, 2010s gaming, modern games, AAA games, indie games, decade in video games, decade video games, most important games, how gaming changed, how video games changed

Id: u68iQAp4ces

Length: 37min 34sec (2254 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020