Gaming trends in the 2010s were a mixed bag, with some genuine revolutions and other false-starts that we've seen before. After all, time is a flat circle, but also a constant unstoppable march from which we cannot return. And it is with these competing principles in our hearts that we look forward to the end of the 2010s and the beginning of the 2020s, a fresh chance to do it all over again.
Some gaming trends this decade blossomed and burned out within the blink of an eye when we look back on them, others persisted and changed the landscape for better or worse. Regardless, these are the gaming trends of the decade that we look back on and remember through misty eyes and cracked skin, whispering "I was there, it happened."
Game Streaming
On June 17, 2010 a Californian company backed by some of the biggest telecom corporations in the world launched a service that would allow you to play video games on a server over the internet, without the need to install anything. This vision of the future came, not from Google, but from OnLive, a complete no-name company founded by the guy who made QuickTime. Everyone was wowed by the prospect of no longer needing to buy a box every 5 years to plug into your TV, and being able to instantly play anything in your library. Sadly there was still a box you needed to plug into a TV, and two years later OnLive laid off all of its employees and everyone basically forgot about streaming live gameplay over the internet and looked forward to the next generation of boxes to plug into their TV. Anyway, how about that Google Stadia?
Branching Narratives
On February 23, 2010 David Cage released his latest in a long line of attempts to turn games into movies that you have to press a button to keep watching. Heavy Rain was slightly more successful than his previous interactive films by including a better range of endings, directly affected by your choices throughout the game. This was a bit of a theme throughout the entire decade, but probably best exemplified in Cage's games released during the 2010s. The idea, which many had come up with before then, was to give real consequences to your actions which play out in the way your unique story develops. But as The Walking Dead and countless open world RPGs began to find their own formulae for how to make it work, we ended up with a weird metagame of players recognizing all the hallmarks of an Important Choice Dialogue and working out what the story was setting up for down the road. Some games, such as Disco Elysium, have done their best to break out of these rigid lanes that branching narrative design has led us down, but we'll need to wait until next decade to see if "Everyone will remember that."
Indiesplosion
Though indies have, technically, always been around in the games industry this decade saw the barriers to entry plummeting and the chances of discovery rocketing for indie developers. Consoles opened their arms to accept the weird and the wonderful and (sometimes) wildly successful brainspawn of a small number of creatives. The pace at which indies appeared on major platforms grew to such an extent this decade that some worried that we were being saturated in passion projects, burying any chance of seeing the best of them even if you dug hard. But the gems we did unearth have been some of the best games of the decade.
Game Streaming (The Other Kind)
Stepping back the slightly ambitious project of playing a game separated at two ends of a phone line, some people were increasingly content to just watch a game from their end while someone else did the playing. Throughout the 2010s this has completely altered the course of the industry, making stars of a small number of teenagers, giving rise to a new culture of gamers and even producing bespoke games intended to be experienced in large groups. Starting with simply recorded gameplay on YouTube, the evolution of Justin.TV into the gaming platform Twitch, now owned by Amazon, supercharged the swap to passive consumption of games. Some platforms, such as PS4's Share Play, haven't quite taken the next step of combining watching and playing across the internet into an immersive pass-the-pad experience, but we're confident the next generation in this decade will feature it heavily.
Walking Sims
Many genres have been born and died in the course of this decade, but none have had the impact of the humble walking simulator. Coined as a way to group together a series of game experiences that eschew combat or other significant interactions with your environment, these are simply games that encourage the quiet, contemplative exploration of their worlds. Indie games like Journey, Gone Home, Dear Esther, and many others kicked off a trend of environmental storytelling, or wordless exploration, which ultimately evolved into the most anticipated AAA release of the final year of the decade: Death Stranding, the ultimate walking simulator.
The Dark Souls of Genres
Another genre to see its birth this decade is also the one with one of the biggest impacts. Dark Souls released on Oct 4 2011 to a ripple of excitement which slowly grew into a tidal wave across the industry, eventually threatening to consume everything. Appropriate, really. The Soulsification of action RPGs, with corpse-run mechanics, combat with the unforgiving precision of a fighting game and cryptic world lore which must be painstakingly pieced together by three-hour YouTube videos can all be traced back to this one game. Whether you think that's good or not is irrelevant, millions of gamers love it. Even Star Wars is Dark Souls now. We are all Dark Souls.
Live Games Never Die
Starting with the Early Access trend, and slowly morphing into the "neverending development" trend, it's been an interesting decade for ongoing game support. MOBAs (a trend unto themselves) like Dota and LoL see entire reshuffling of their various character abilities on the regular, while some games such as Fortnite can be evolved from unremarkable base defence games into an overnight battle royale sensation (yet another trend of their own, if we could do 12 trends we would but the cosmic energies of 10 trends in a decade is too good to pass up). The question we have for these live games is the same one we have for The Simpsons: when do they officially die? With the amount they're raking in with microtransactions (make that 13 trends) and battle passes (ok, 14) we're going to guess that the answer is, much like The Simpsons: in our hearts, after season 12; but practically, never.
E(-)sports
Firstly, a short moment of silence for the hyphen in esports which was mercilessly culled, along with the lesser camelcase eSports, a couple of years ago. We'll never forget you. Thankfully, professional gaming itself has yet to face the same chopping block yet, avoiding the fate of a similar esports boom in the early 2000s. Much like then, this phase was spurred on by the Korean fascination with StarCraft, though quickly spiralled out into other games with the growing ease of online streaming. We're just now beginning to see some of those early hits fading out into the hall of fame, but plenty of other games rise to take their place.
VR (Again)
Like esports, Virtual Reality has had its fair share of false starts, but found a solid platform again this decade. With the pieces in place now, there's some hope that our dreams of disappearing inside game worlds could become (affordably) real soon. Big experiences outside the home are already taking place in specially built VR theme parks, adding to the ubiquity of the platform to help bring it to most consumer faces soon. There's just one complicating factor at the moment, but even that should be a thing of the past soon...
Death of the Platform
Probably the most exciting trend we've seen throughout this decade is the slow merging of platforms. Sony's Cross-buy/Cross-play/Cross-save features opened a window where our handheld and home consoles no longer needed separate ecosystems or stores or save states. The Switch came along to take that to its logical conclusion of being both the home console and the handheld, but it also helped break down other barrier, the big ones. Cross-platform is increasingly common for third-party online games now, and even Sony is giving in to pressure from consumers to play with their gamer brethren on other consoles. With Microsoft confirming Game Pass coming to Nintendo Switch, there's not long before we throw off the shackles of the console wars and become one big happy singularity. Join the One-ness. It's warm here.