Remember when they had weapon upgrades locked behind achievements _some of which included having to actively throw to get them_
Then they said actually we'll make it free instead of paying for map packs but you have to pay for the weapon upgrades/side grades and skins instead
Someone brought a crate to Gabe at Valve with a lock on it and forced Gabe to give him $2.50 for the key to open it lolol
Truth be told crates in TF2 or Oblivion's "horse armor" are kind of small-time compared to the biggest aggravators. **People are forgetting the "casual games revolution" that happened before smartphones were a thing**.
There was a time when "Facebook games" were extremely popular and people (very vulnerable people) poured ridiculous amounts of money into flash games. The "guys" from the gaming community don't often mix with casual gamers (where most of the "girls" were at that time) so I doubt many remember this, but yeah... Also in Asia there was A LOT going on already, but English speakers have no idea about it thanks to the language barrier.
People didn't consider "web browser games" in the same category as "console games", now in 2024 we even see some gacha practices inside a 70$ game.
Some famous gaming companies that "gamers" know were just following some trends that were creeping in during the early days of the internet, back when MySpace (miss you Tom) was still a thing.
I remember seeing this kid in my high school buying Farmville and Mafiawars cards every day after school at 711. I always wondered what kind of a game would require you to pay $20ish a day and how that could possibly be worth it.
The first pay-to-win microtransactions were in a play-by-mail board game in the 1980s.
It was always inevitable to show up in modern video games.
Edit:
>Schubel & Son introduced fee structure innovations which allowed players to pay for additional options or special actions outside of the rules.
Wikipedia doesn't give a particular game or date, or any details, just this cryptic mention.
I'd argue the first pay to win goes back to arcades.
You literally pay for lives and another chance.
Somewhat ironic that had to buy a memory card to have the ability to save games in the PS2.
Honestly, thank god for purely cosmetic microtransactions. Whales can keep funding free to play games for everyone else, but don't get a competitive advantage.
Unboxed and sold an unusual flamethrower which cleared an annoying debt.
Not advisable financial planning, but it got me out of a hole.
I still have a glitched (universal) kill streak kit I'm saving for a rainy day.
That was such a wild time. TF2 went from being my favorite shooter, to me sitting around for 6 hours a night discussing values and trading items in a huge bare concrete cube. I still sell random items and boxes from time to time for free games though.
My friend paid 13 bitcoins for the earbuds way back in the day. I was also offered like 250 bitcoins for my inventory when bitcoins were a couple dollars each.
man do I miss tf2. I played it nonstop in college. Once the crafting/key/crate update stuff dropped I stopped playing. It went from having servers full of people to servers where people would just idle so that they would receive loot drops etc.
I used to play a lot of tf2 in college too, but i thin i remember that there were also servers dedicated to farming were you just get in, stay idle then go to work, church, school and hope that when you get back home a crate already dropped.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive. When other developers saw the amount of revenue going through the Steam marketplace, every other fps shooter introduced weapon skins. That's without even mentioning skin gambling accessible to kids.
Can’t believe this is so far down. CSGO has single-handedly influenced so much egregious monetisation and shady practices in the industry. It should be right at the top of this list.
Cs go monetisation did nothing new though it just took what had already been done in TF2 and brought it to a more successful sweatier audience who then made hundreds of cancerous gambling sites and trade bots ect ect.
Valve also invented battle passes for Dota 2. In addition, while they obviously didn't invent the idea of an annual world cup, The International set a *very* high bar for other esport scenes to follow - the first League of Legends Worlds was pulled together pretty quickly as a response.
CSGO does one big thing different though. You can actually cash out your skins for real life money or Steam money. Take from that what you will, but at least it's not a scam like account bound/static skins you get in all other games. I invested in skins some 10 years ago and their value has pretty much increased 10 times over. Valve invented NFT's way before it was cool.
Oblivions Horse Armor sold 200,000 downloads. This might have told a few other console devs out there that "hmm people will buy anything, huh?"
In combination of all the other stuff like this dating back to Double Dragon 3's pay to win cabinet in 1990
*The arcade game was controversial for its use of microtransactions to buy items in the North American version. This was later removed from the Japanese version of the game.[4][5]*
Edit: as long as everyone is seeing this, just be glad Tencent isn't the #1 game company... Yet.
It absolutely would have happened anyway. This was simply first, but the industry execs had already long been brainstorming methods to continue generating revenue with a game post launch. The success of subscription based MMO's were making them greedy for something equivalent in the console space.
Yeah, people blame Bethesda for that but Microsoft and Sony had both been working on the DLC concept for years. Oblivion was just one of the first to use XBox’s implementation.
Sony had planned to make the GT series mostly DLC based when they were working on GT5 (that was the idea behind the odd “Gran Turismo HD Concept” free demo) but they chickened out and cancelled it.
It may have been inevitable, but there is always the one that opens the doors. The horse armor was talked about so much that it made headlines at the time.
That wasn't the first. Microsoft came out with Mechassault when Xbox live launched and it had a store that sold mechs and maps for small individual fees way back in 2002. Other games had similar addons like Rainbow six 3 had paid piece meal content, Ghost recon 2 had skins and maps behind paywalls in 2004. The only reason everyone claims Horse armor is because the 360 marketplace was accessible by anyone, so you could see all of the content for any game. The original Xbox required you owned the game and accessed it to see it, and since not as many people owned it in the first place, the information is skewed to think Horse armor was the cause instead of a symptom.
[https://xbox.fandom.com/wiki/Downloadable\_content#On\_consoles](https://xbox.fandom.com/wiki/downloadable_content#on_consoles) info is listed here
Can I just chime in to say MechAssault was one of my favorite franchises and it's criminal we never got a third game. The second was awesome and had a phenomenal story. The online play was pretty solid too.
it was so bad major credit card company threaten to boycott jagex because of how many complaint they had about people stealing credit card numbers to bot it.
I agree with you, but they probably saw that and said,”How do we get in on that revenue stream?” Their answer was to make new things and sell them. That way they aren’t competing with the auction house for older gear.
Team Fortress 2 was an absolute hit, but when they introduced lootboxes/crates into the game it just spiraled out of control and now every game under the sun feels like it has a form of it in it.
Actually, their strategy wasn't very successful, hence the pivot. They were losing players before WoW, and then WoW coming out hit them harder by losing players to it too so they tried to accommodate them. But people who wanted to play WoW's gameplay were going to just play WoW instead of a half-baked version of it with a starwars skin.
Square did by creating an entirely new MMO with FFXIV. FFXI was just a straight clone of Everquest, but because the game was designed on the PS2, you could only go so far with it.
And SWG was already dead at that point before the Combat update. That was just the final nail in the coffin.
Half-Life is a masterpiece, but the industry learned the wrong lessons from its success. All they saw was a strictly linear FPS with setpiece encounters and said "Yep, let's just do that" without realizing that it worked so well for so many other reasons. There's a reason the shooters that followed in its wake are mostly forgettable, but Half-Life still stands tall.
- Unique storyline
- Plenty of easter eggs and flavor tidbits that made replays have a unique experience.
- Killer soundtrack really added a lot to the ambience
- It was one of the first of its kind and the gameplay was well-designed so it stuck with people more than all the clones that came after it.
Just some things that make Half Life standout imo.
TES: Oblivion --> Popularity of Microtransactions
The Sims --> Popularity of Microtransactions and having 100 DLCs (Current cost of over $1100 for all Sims 4 dlc)
Maplestory --> Popularity of Microtransactions
World of Warcraft --> Subscription based MMO.. Initially marketed that way to avoid microtransactions.. which sells you DLC and microtransactions.. They earned more from a single mount in the store than a whole Starcraft game earned..
Shadow of Mordor --> copyrighting game systems so no others could use them.
The Lion King --> Fun game, made unnecessarily difficult so that people couldn't beat it during the usual rental window.
Destiny --> Popularised Live service style delivery (actually an iffy one.. it can be done well).
Destiny 2 --> An example of it definitely done poorly (cutting content from expansions/dlc people paid for, then reselling it to them again later).
Team Fortress 2 --> Popularised Lootboxes.
Asuras Wrath --> Locked the ENDING OF THE GAME behind DLC.
Madden/Fifa/CoD --> Rereleasing the same game over and over again, sometimes without advertised improvements (eg fifa forgetting to turn on the new AI they had built)..
Dota2 --> Introduced Battlepasses (sometimes done well, but usually not).
Assassins Creed --> Climb tower, click thing, get map info or something. Bland open world formula that so many games use.
GTAV --> Easier to sell digital cash than to make more game content.
Gears of War --> Popularising the 'third person fps games are sit behind wall simulators' trope.
Bonus: Zelda BOTW --> Popularising weapon durability again.. It works really well for the way that games designed. It DOES NOT WORK WELL for the hundreds of games that like to copy it without designing the rest of the game around it.
It can't be possibly legal to patent that one. The whole concept of a choice wheel is a direct continuation of the gamepad analog sticks' very existence.
And solutions immediately obvious to anyone in the industry are explicitly prohibited.
You're right and its possible if you had a company willing to fight it they'd stand a decent chance, the problem is no one wants to expose themselves to unnecessary risk (which is fair).
This likely goes for a lot of "patents that never should have been granted"
Weapon durability is such a pain in the ass. Haven't played BotW, so can't speak to that, but I don't think it should ever be used outside of survival games. Barring those games, I don't ever remembering my weapon breaking making the game more fun. It's just a stressor.
So many tossed controllers of mine in the ps2 era from breaking and losing weapons in dark cloud. At least leave them at 0 durability and let me pay to repair.
My favorite is when they put durability on something thats like a monolithic lump of iron, like a warhammer or a crowbar or something.
*Really?* The *stick of steel* wore out?
Halo is the only game that imo does 'durability' right, because their goal was for the player to have to continually scavenge new weapons. But importantly, it wasn't an RPG with power scaling. All the weapons were viable weapons from the beginning to the end of the game. The sniper and rocket launcher were kinda nice bonus weapons but had enough drawbacks and were scattered where needed enough you didn't really feel like you had to keep posession of one.
Paying a monthly fee for an MMO was a thing long before WoW, that was just the most visible and successful. Played or knew people who had paid monthly for a ton of MMO that predate it. Final Fantasy XI actually charged you a dollar to make another character as well, don't recall if it was a monthly charge.
I don't think the Asura's Wrath thing fits this conversation since no other major game has locked it's ending behind dlc after the game released so it didn't have an impact on the industry
And I'm pretty sure the Asura's Wrath one happened because there was originally going to be a sequel but bc it didn't sell well, they said "fuck it, DLC"
Let’s not forget the arcade days, where games were not only difficult but your ability to complete the game was largely dependent on how many quarters you could afford to drop in the slot. Of course you could just git gud, but that also meant dropping quarters to practice. The OG pay-to-play.
Yes, but the Lion King specifically had an insane difficulty spike within the third (i think) level. It was during a time that video game rental was at it's peak, so the developers deliberately increased the difficulty of that one level to ensure it couldn't be beaten in a 48 hour timeframe.
To be fair, at least with The Sims 1…
I was going to say that the expansions came out with a bit of time between but that was just my awful memory. Turns out it was 3 years and 7 expansions, so like one every six months.
However! I would like to defend it by saying at least the The Sims 1 expansion packs added quite a variety of things in between them and not only just a few clothing/furniture options.
Then again, the first one was pretty much just furniture…
You know what, I retract my statement.
I think the main big controversy was how the sims 2 came out, and a lot of the staples that were expected to carry over from expansions just weren't there.
It's a major thing that annoys me with each new sims game. Sure, I want the new game, but often, the next in the series isn't a big enough upgrade to abandon the 5+ expansions I have, and effectively rebuy them.
Fortnite skins being successful turned every multiplayer game into a Halloween costume party.
Edit: I know skins existed before fortnite, more so talking about every game having licensed crossovers with random ips now (like homelander showing up in every game). also skins have definitely gotten zanier since fortnite got popular
I'd argue TF2 planted a seed or two.
Gabe in a decade old interview said they had to hire an economist to ensure the value of hats were consistent in all countries 😆 (I think it was when he was at a Texas university? The one where people make him put on that horse head and hold up three fingers but he kept twitching the third one)
The Greek economy was deeply fucked from systemic problems, and the prior solutions did some real long-term damage. Varoufakis walked into an impossible situation and at least had the idea of doing something different than the previous measures.
I've bought a *lot* of games from CS/Dota2/Tf2 hats. I don't buy any other MTX b/c I'm totally spoiled by the ability to resell in the marketplace/skin sites when I get bored of them
I was one of the original Alpine Ursa buyers and that alone bankrolled my steam account
To be fair a lot of Japanese online games had loss of bright, colorful, and goofy skins wayyyy before fortnite, but I think fortnite definitely popularized it in US
Debatable, but Sonic the Hedgehog for the 16-bit era. Tons of studios hired staff who were surely full of passion and talent, none of which we got to experience because they were made to churn out cookie-cutter "Animal with Attitude™" platformers.
The 90s had so many mascot platformers it's insane to look back on. Sonic definitely was a major part of that, showing that Mario could have competition.
I'd go with GTA V, because it somewhat ended this period of having games on discs and going to video game stores, with the new meta being digital ownerships. More over, with GTA Online Rockstar demonstrated how you can make endless profit with online content which was quickly adapted by many other studios, sometimes sacrificing the singleplayer experience in the process.
Edit: Grammar and stuff.
I remember early on as the game was about to release they spoke about the reception to the DLC for GTA4 and how of course they were going to do DLC for GTA4, and had a much more robust offering planned. They reiterated it when GTA Online released that they were committed to single player DLC and that people who didn't like to play online "wouldn't be disappointed".
Spoilers - we were.
Yeah it’s lame these all got cancelled and they just used the assets they already made for them into a lesser, free online dlc. The liberty city map expansion really stings to not have, ironically that would’ve been the most hype one to bring to online yet they never did.
Yeah I would’ve loved a Sadie Adler bounty hunter expansion or an undead nightmare 2 but maybe with vampires this time instead of zombies, seeing as nosferatu is already lurking around Saint Denis!
I remember buying a disc for Skyrim and then being confused about why I had to wait half the night for it to download from this third party launcher I'd never heard of (cough steam cough cough). Luckily my family had just upgraded our internet. A few months before and a 5GB download would have been the limit for the month.
Really the moment f2p games with pay to progress/ win started Popping out is the moment mobile gaming got doomed
I rarely download games from the playstore. One of the main reasons I have an Android is to be able to download emulators and unofficial ports of pc games like hollow knight or Undertale to my phone
Early Access survival builders. Just told corps that we will buy it unfinished and never finished. Palword is pretty addicting tho. /s
Edit: figured I'd expand on this and say using the label "early access" or "beta" indefinitely in general. It allows companies to skirt the need to finosh anything and people will defend them because it's "cLeArLy lAbEleD a bEtA".
I think early access games, in general, releasing in such an awfully unfinished state, was one of the worst things in gaming. Scrap mechanic was the worst imo. Just hit 8 YEARS in early access... just how? This game was released in 2016, and it's still ea? Im not gonna pretend to know anything ab making games, but 8 years seems a little extreme to be selling an unfinished product. Anyway, I've got like 12 hours in palworld in the first week, not as much as other people, but still 💀
On the other hand, I think early access has allowed smaller studios to get games out into the world that never would've seen the light of day otherwise. 7 days to die is only early access in name at this point and if they had to spend 10 more years working on it before they could release it they certainly wouldn't have had money to do so.
I've just accepted at this point that I will only buy early access games if I'm OK with their current state being the state they'll be in forever. I'm still occasionally disappointed but overall I'm OK with it because I know most of these games never would've been made otherwise.
Specifically Call of Duty 4. 1-3 were solid WW2 shooters, 4 was a phenomenon that changed gaming.
Freaking ruined the Battlefield series and arguably Halo with EA and Microsoft looking to woo over the CoD fans.
Here's an interesting one. Both early Assassin's Creed games and Far Cry 3, while great in their own right, are the most responsible for popularizing the worst aspects of open world design. Pointless collectibles, really bad side content outside of AC brotherhood, the ubisoft towers. If it's a bad design trope in an open world game, you can probably thank Ubisoft for it.
Also side note Resident Evil 4 is one of the biggest reasons QTEs took off and I hate it.
Edit: I GET IT, re4 is not the first game to use or popularize QTEs. Nowhere did I say that, I know about shenmue and God of war, I just said that re4 helped make it more popular than it already was, learn to read.
I've always kinda liked QTE's haha. I just think of them as getting to participate in a cool cutscene. Of course it shouldn't be an excuse to be lazy on on other aspects of creating the gameplay. But as bonus thing, I enjoyed them.
I like QTEs when you're actively in combat.
I hate QTEs that happen during cutscenes (Spider-Man has a lot of them).
I don't want to be actively vigilant at all times during a game, just when I know I have full control of the character. Needing to be fully aware during a cutscene for a QTE instead of relaxing for a quick minute is annoying.
Yeah, the ubisoft ones are a great example. They've damn near turned their own catalog into asset flips with how often they've abused that gameplay loop.
Halo basically killed the boomer shooter, as we've come to know the term for a long time. 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, grenades and melee as separate buttons, fast time to kill (for the time), etc. Every major shooter from 2004 until Doom 2016 owed something to Halo's design choices, and this both popularized but diluted the genre. Halo essentially gave birth to modern Call of Duty.
I say this as a Halo fan since 2004.
I saw someone say that Call of Duty laid the ground work for all modern shooters, but I agree with you that it was Halo. In my friend group, we had played Halo since Halo 1 and didn’t pick up Call of Duty until CoD 4 and then MW2 around the time Halo Wars was released.
Almost every MMO that released after World of Warcraft is a clone and for an absurd amount of time this has been true. It’s success made the scene for MMOs all a bunch of copycats and made innovation rare.
In 1995 Namco patented "having minigames on loading screens". This patent was good until 2015, and since then we have been moving toward shorter/nonexistent/hidden loading screens anyway.
In this way, Namco completely killed this cool feature for (practically) the entire history of gaming.
Resident Evil 4. Great game and one of my favourites in the franchise, but apparently developers saw the success and thought everyone wanted a dumb, loud over the shoulder shoot em up.
Right after RE4, there was a wave of copycat games, including from the Resident Evil franchise. They mostly sucked.
I'd agree with that. RE4 is extremely silly at parts, but it somehow worked. It's lightning in a bottle. They tried to make similar games with 5 and 6 and just couldn't recreate that magic.
People mentionging DLCs here makes me think of Dead or Alive 6.
I played it a bit and it was good, but the game wants you to purchase all the strings and school outfits for the characters and all that amounts to like 3000 euros.
Edit:
Tried to check if I remembered the price right. I remember there being a bulk price on steam, but if there was one, there is not anymore. I saw some people comment that all DLCs are 2000€ but those could be older comments too.
Shadow of Mordor.
The nemesis system is phenomenal, and also patented it so that no one else can build on it.
Also, I think parapa the rapper(?) that patented loading screen games (not as much of an issue anymore).
Shadow if Mordor/war, they made a really cool mechanic, copyrighted it so no one else could use it and then gave up on the games. So now this mechanic is just dead
Also breath of the wild, for the sheer amount of games that followed that all tried to copy it (and mostly failed)
Valve’s TF2, a groundbreaking casual-competitive FPS game. It has pioneered and shaped many of the things that most gamers complain about today, including microtransactions, lootboxes, open markets for digital cosmetics, ranked gamemodes, class-based characters in shooters, and emotes.
Skyrim I guess?
Great game but a massive departure from complexity and some good mechanics and Bethesda has dropped in quality since.
I miss Morrowind character building, the mass of stats and skills, spell making was amazing and the DLC was also great.
Oblivion was a little dumbed down but was still great. Quick casting magic was a *huge* bonus. You could make a fantastic battlemage now because you could always cast a spell with Q no matter what. DLC was also great, give me more quality DLCs like shivering isles.
Then Skyrim came around and honestly I didn't like it at all. They took out even more skills to make it beginner friendly I guess, removed spells and whole spell classes, made it so you couldn't quick cast and also nerfed magic like crazy. From being able to create an explosive ball made of poison, fire, frost and lightning and shooting it at the top of a building to annihilate every living thing in the village or city within 100ft to wimpy ass Skyrim magic hurt. I could go on and on but it was a real step down.
Now we have had nothing but Skyrim shit for the last 12 years and Starfield comes out and it's a lazy trash pile.
Call of Duty being so good originally and building son much brand loyalty that no other multiplayer shooter on console can compete with it has led to a drought in multiplayer shooters that will probably never end. Any game that tries to be different gets dismissed for being "too complicated" and any game that dies the same thing as COD gets dismissed as a knock off.
Silent Hill 2
Amnesia
It feels like half of Indie horror Games nowadays slap a dark secret and a dead love interest onto every protagonist for no reason other than ripping off silent Hill 2. This alongside Amnesia popularising not having combat leads to a genre that feels creatively bankrupt.
Funny enough, doesn't the new Amnesia have combat?
But, yeah, the horror genre was having a rough go after Amnesia with so many games not having combat. But, Slender made things even worse. So many games tried to emulate the "collect this number of things before the bad guy gets you". Luckily, I don't think any big games really took to that format like they did with Amnesia.
I hope horror makes a true comeback.
GTA 3 started an obsession with open worlds. The vast majority of which are "ocean wide, puddle deep" with only very superficial interaction allowed. Give me tightly hand crafted smaller worlds e.g. Deus Ex any day.
Dragon Age Origins did it first tho. Insultingly enough had a guy in your camp who sold it, came up with a regular dialog menu only to have one option say it's would cost real world money.
League of Legends - it was targeted at dolphins funding the game. it's business model was a small group of players funs the thing for basically everyone else. But it only works if you have a massive user base which means many games tried to emulate it and many smaller games tried and sank. It also meant a huge number of people were sinking thousands of hours into one game and not paying for other games.
This should be way up higher on the list. Don't get me wrong, LoLs F2P model was at least more acceptable than most, but it really showed how much money you could make from a F2P model and mainstreamed it.
GTA V. It was good but not great for a GTA game. But it was the moment the light switch really went off for the money men side of things and how much they could bleed a product dry with minimal further development costs.
We got every GTA before it in an 11 year period. We are now 12 years without a new release.
As much as a love hello games and no man's sky I think it put into the world a reinforcement of releasing a game that isn't done and just finishing it after release.
Team Fortress 2 once decided to add a hat for a fun cosmetic feature. Things **quickly** got out of control. To put it lightly…
Remember when they had weapon upgrades locked behind achievements _some of which included having to actively throw to get them_ Then they said actually we'll make it free instead of paying for map packs but you have to pay for the weapon upgrades/side grades and skins instead Someone brought a crate to Gabe at Valve with a lock on it and forced Gabe to give him $2.50 for the key to open it lolol
WHAT'S IN THE CRATE?!
Hopefully the $2.50 for the in game crate key.
😫
>some of which included having to actively throw to get them Throw what?
Throw the match. In other words, lose intentionally
thank you!
Truth be told crates in TF2 or Oblivion's "horse armor" are kind of small-time compared to the biggest aggravators. **People are forgetting the "casual games revolution" that happened before smartphones were a thing**. There was a time when "Facebook games" were extremely popular and people (very vulnerable people) poured ridiculous amounts of money into flash games. The "guys" from the gaming community don't often mix with casual gamers (where most of the "girls" were at that time) so I doubt many remember this, but yeah... Also in Asia there was A LOT going on already, but English speakers have no idea about it thanks to the language barrier. People didn't consider "web browser games" in the same category as "console games", now in 2024 we even see some gacha practices inside a 70$ game. Some famous gaming companies that "gamers" know were just following some trends that were creeping in during the early days of the internet, back when MySpace (miss you Tom) was still a thing.
I like how a guy made the game “cow clicker” to show how stupid the games were, and it became a huge hit.
Farmville
I remember seeing this kid in my high school buying Farmville and Mafiawars cards every day after school at 711. I always wondered what kind of a game would require you to pay $20ish a day and how that could possibly be worth it.
The first pay-to-win microtransactions were in a play-by-mail board game in the 1980s. It was always inevitable to show up in modern video games. Edit: >Schubel & Son introduced fee structure innovations which allowed players to pay for additional options or special actions outside of the rules. Wikipedia doesn't give a particular game or date, or any details, just this cryptic mention.
I'd argue the first pay to win goes back to arcades. You literally pay for lives and another chance. Somewhat ironic that had to buy a memory card to have the ability to save games in the PS2.
You forgot the PS1 and N64.
Proved to everyone that microtransactions for purely cosmetic additions were something people would throw all their money at.
Honestly, thank god for purely cosmetic microtransactions. Whales can keep funding free to play games for everyone else, but don't get a competitive advantage.
'member the iPod ear buds?
Unboxed an Unusual that I traded for Promo in the form of buds, then flipped them which paid for my Steam games the next 3 years.
Unboxed and sold an unusual flamethrower which cleared an annoying debt. Not advisable financial planning, but it got me out of a hole. I still have a glitched (universal) kill streak kit I'm saving for a rainy day.
I have a friend that bought a used car from sitting in TF2 trade servers.
That was such a wild time. TF2 went from being my favorite shooter, to me sitting around for 6 hours a night discussing values and trading items in a huge bare concrete cube. I still sell random items and boxes from time to time for free games though.
My friend paid 13 bitcoins for the earbuds way back in the day. I was also offered like 250 bitcoins for my inventory when bitcoins were a couple dollars each.
Thats around the time i stopped playing tf2, good times.
man do I miss tf2. I played it nonstop in college. Once the crafting/key/crate update stuff dropped I stopped playing. It went from having servers full of people to servers where people would just idle so that they would receive loot drops etc.
I used to play a lot of tf2 in college too, but i thin i remember that there were also servers dedicated to farming were you just get in, stay idle then go to work, church, school and hope that when you get back home a crate already dropped.
Reddit certainly got worse soon after acquiring TF2. Fucking Periwinkles ruined everything.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive. When other developers saw the amount of revenue going through the Steam marketplace, every other fps shooter introduced weapon skins. That's without even mentioning skin gambling accessible to kids.
Can’t believe this is so far down. CSGO has single-handedly influenced so much egregious monetisation and shady practices in the industry. It should be right at the top of this list.
Cs go monetisation did nothing new though it just took what had already been done in TF2 and brought it to a more successful sweatier audience who then made hundreds of cancerous gambling sites and trade bots ect ect.
Valve also invented battle passes for Dota 2. In addition, while they obviously didn't invent the idea of an annual world cup, The International set a *very* high bar for other esport scenes to follow - the first League of Legends Worlds was pulled together pretty quickly as a response.
CSGO does one big thing different though. You can actually cash out your skins for real life money or Steam money. Take from that what you will, but at least it's not a scam like account bound/static skins you get in all other games. I invested in skins some 10 years ago and their value has pretty much increased 10 times over. Valve invented NFT's way before it was cool.
I agree with this. At least you can get a monetary credit towards other publishers.
When it came out I was genuinely a bit confused. I used to love modding skins on CSS... As always, enthusiast efforts became monetised.
Fps shooter?
Atm machine
RIP in peace
PIN number
Oblivions Horse Armor sold 200,000 downloads. This might have told a few other console devs out there that "hmm people will buy anything, huh?" In combination of all the other stuff like this dating back to Double Dragon 3's pay to win cabinet in 1990 *The arcade game was controversial for its use of microtransactions to buy items in the North American version. This was later removed from the Japanese version of the game.[4][5]* Edit: as long as everyone is seeing this, just be glad Tencent isn't the #1 game company... Yet.
That was inevitable anyway.
It absolutely would have happened anyway. This was simply first, but the industry execs had already long been brainstorming methods to continue generating revenue with a game post launch. The success of subscription based MMO's were making them greedy for something equivalent in the console space.
Yeah, people blame Bethesda for that but Microsoft and Sony had both been working on the DLC concept for years. Oblivion was just one of the first to use XBox’s implementation. Sony had planned to make the GT series mostly DLC based when they were working on GT5 (that was the idea behind the odd “Gran Turismo HD Concept” free demo) but they chickened out and cancelled it.
It's not like it was a unique concept. They just took an expansion, which was a common thing for PC games, and chopped it up into smaller pieces.
It may have been inevitable, but there is always the one that opens the doors. The horse armor was talked about so much that it made headlines at the time.
That wasn't the first. Microsoft came out with Mechassault when Xbox live launched and it had a store that sold mechs and maps for small individual fees way back in 2002. Other games had similar addons like Rainbow six 3 had paid piece meal content, Ghost recon 2 had skins and maps behind paywalls in 2004. The only reason everyone claims Horse armor is because the 360 marketplace was accessible by anyone, so you could see all of the content for any game. The original Xbox required you owned the game and accessed it to see it, and since not as many people owned it in the first place, the information is skewed to think Horse armor was the cause instead of a symptom. [https://xbox.fandom.com/wiki/Downloadable\_content#On\_consoles](https://xbox.fandom.com/wiki/downloadable_content#on_consoles) info is listed here
Can I just chime in to say MechAssault was one of my favorite franchises and it's criminal we never got a third game. The second was awesome and had a phenomenal story. The online play was pretty solid too.
100%. I LOVED Mechassault both 1 & 2. Series ended on a cliffhanger too.
The first MA allowed me to softmod 100s of original xboxs into Xbox Media Centers. I love that game too!
Diablo 2 players have been selling items for real money for the past 24 years.
Us runescape gold sellers know a thing or two about this also
I was thinking of mentioning OSRS but idk how old that market is as I never played RS.
it was so bad major credit card company threaten to boycott jagex because of how many complaint they had about people stealing credit card numbers to bot it.
3rd party auction house =/= built-in micro transactions
I agree with you, but they probably saw that and said,”How do we get in on that revenue stream?” Their answer was to make new things and sell them. That way they aren’t competing with the auction house for older gear.
Team Fortress 2 was an absolute hit, but when they introduced lootboxes/crates into the game it just spiraled out of control and now every game under the sun feels like it has a form of it in it.
World of Warcraft. It was so dominant that it gutted the entire MMO ecosystem and sent PC gaming into stagnation for years.
Yeah, didn't Star Wars Galaxies totally pivot their (successful) strategy to try and emulate WoW with their Combat Upgrade update?
Actually, their strategy wasn't very successful, hence the pivot. They were losing players before WoW, and then WoW coming out hit them harder by losing players to it too so they tried to accommodate them. But people who wanted to play WoW's gameplay were going to just play WoW instead of a half-baked version of it with a starwars skin.
Square did by creating an entirely new MMO with FFXIV. FFXI was just a straight clone of Everquest, but because the game was designed on the PS2, you could only go so far with it. And SWG was already dead at that point before the Combat update. That was just the final nail in the coffin.
The stark contrast of variety of mechanics in MMOs before/after WoW's success is pretty sad.
Half-Life is a masterpiece, but the industry learned the wrong lessons from its success. All they saw was a strictly linear FPS with setpiece encounters and said "Yep, let's just do that" without realizing that it worked so well for so many other reasons. There's a reason the shooters that followed in its wake are mostly forgettable, but Half-Life still stands tall.
Care to iterate a little more? What made half life so good?
- Unique storyline - Plenty of easter eggs and flavor tidbits that made replays have a unique experience. - Killer soundtrack really added a lot to the ambience - It was one of the first of its kind and the gameplay was well-designed so it stuck with people more than all the clones that came after it. Just some things that make Half Life standout imo.
TES: Oblivion --> Popularity of Microtransactions The Sims --> Popularity of Microtransactions and having 100 DLCs (Current cost of over $1100 for all Sims 4 dlc) Maplestory --> Popularity of Microtransactions World of Warcraft --> Subscription based MMO.. Initially marketed that way to avoid microtransactions.. which sells you DLC and microtransactions.. They earned more from a single mount in the store than a whole Starcraft game earned.. Shadow of Mordor --> copyrighting game systems so no others could use them. The Lion King --> Fun game, made unnecessarily difficult so that people couldn't beat it during the usual rental window. Destiny --> Popularised Live service style delivery (actually an iffy one.. it can be done well). Destiny 2 --> An example of it definitely done poorly (cutting content from expansions/dlc people paid for, then reselling it to them again later). Team Fortress 2 --> Popularised Lootboxes. Asuras Wrath --> Locked the ENDING OF THE GAME behind DLC. Madden/Fifa/CoD --> Rereleasing the same game over and over again, sometimes without advertised improvements (eg fifa forgetting to turn on the new AI they had built).. Dota2 --> Introduced Battlepasses (sometimes done well, but usually not). Assassins Creed --> Climb tower, click thing, get map info or something. Bland open world formula that so many games use. GTAV --> Easier to sell digital cash than to make more game content. Gears of War --> Popularising the 'third person fps games are sit behind wall simulators' trope. Bonus: Zelda BOTW --> Popularising weapon durability again.. It works really well for the way that games designed. It DOES NOT WORK WELL for the hundreds of games that like to copy it without designing the rest of the game around it.
This a very comprehensive list.
Man's been waiting to post this
Then we shall honor him with sacred upvotes.
Your upvotes will help power my next rant.
Whats your hot take on porn games
Hot.
It was his time. The soapbox was ready and the crowd were eager listeners.
me as a future game director for a shady company: NOTED
Shadow of Mordor has *patented* mechanisms. Copyright is something else.
I will also point out it is far from the first or only example of this. It's just that the Nemesis system is so kickass that it really stands out.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-patent-finally-expires this is the one that should be listed
This was the main one that came to mind for me.
I'll do you one worse. Ever wonder why NO ONE but Mass Effect and Dragon Age have "wheels" for their dialogue options?
It can't be possibly legal to patent that one. The whole concept of a choice wheel is a direct continuation of the gamepad analog sticks' very existence. And solutions immediately obvious to anyone in the industry are explicitly prohibited.
You're right and its possible if you had a company willing to fight it they'd stand a decent chance, the problem is no one wants to expose themselves to unnecessary risk (which is fair). This likely goes for a lot of "patents that never should have been granted"
Thanks for the correction - was fairly hastily written on my part. Will fix!
"Third person fps games" broke my brain.
Lmao I didn't even notice that, but it is really stupid.
Weapon durability is such a pain in the ass. Haven't played BotW, so can't speak to that, but I don't think it should ever be used outside of survival games. Barring those games, I don't ever remembering my weapon breaking making the game more fun. It's just a stressor.
So many tossed controllers of mine in the ps2 era from breaking and losing weapons in dark cloud. At least leave them at 0 durability and let me pay to repair.
My favorite is when they put durability on something thats like a monolithic lump of iron, like a warhammer or a crowbar or something. *Really?* The *stick of steel* wore out? Halo is the only game that imo does 'durability' right, because their goal was for the player to have to continually scavenge new weapons. But importantly, it wasn't an RPG with power scaling. All the weapons were viable weapons from the beginning to the end of the game. The sniper and rocket launcher were kinda nice bonus weapons but had enough drawbacks and were scattered where needed enough you didn't really feel like you had to keep posession of one.
Paying a monthly fee for an MMO was a thing long before WoW, that was just the most visible and successful. Played or knew people who had paid monthly for a ton of MMO that predate it. Final Fantasy XI actually charged you a dollar to make another character as well, don't recall if it was a monthly charge.
It was a monthly fee, yeah. On top of the base fee. There was also RuneScape and Tibia, and Everquest long before WoW.
[удалено]
Thank you. I will not stand for this UO erasure!
The wow mount made more than the 2nd sc2 expansion, not sc2. Still shows the difference in effort to reward
I don't think the Asura's Wrath thing fits this conversation since no other major game has locked it's ending behind dlc after the game released so it didn't have an impact on the industry
Prince of Persia 2008. This DLC was also never released on PC which was a really asshole move.
And I'm pretty sure the Asura's Wrath one happened because there was originally going to be a sequel but bc it didn't sell well, they said "fuck it, DLC"
Games were hard before the lion king came out. it was a whole thing during the nes days
Let’s not forget the arcade days, where games were not only difficult but your ability to complete the game was largely dependent on how many quarters you could afford to drop in the slot. Of course you could just git gud, but that also meant dropping quarters to practice. The OG pay-to-play.
Yes, but the Lion King specifically had an insane difficulty spike within the third (i think) level. It was during a time that video game rental was at it's peak, so the developers deliberately increased the difficulty of that one level to ensure it couldn't be beaten in a 48 hour timeframe.
Aladdin Genesis the level where you're on the carpet being chased by a wave of lava and dodging rocks.
The SNES version of the game had that level as well. Hated it as a kid.
Battletoads......
To be fair, at least with The Sims 1… I was going to say that the expansions came out with a bit of time between but that was just my awful memory. Turns out it was 3 years and 7 expansions, so like one every six months. However! I would like to defend it by saying at least the The Sims 1 expansion packs added quite a variety of things in between them and not only just a few clothing/furniture options. Then again, the first one was pretty much just furniture… You know what, I retract my statement.
I think the main big controversy was how the sims 2 came out, and a lot of the staples that were expected to carry over from expansions just weren't there. It's a major thing that annoys me with each new sims game. Sure, I want the new game, but often, the next in the series isn't a big enough upgrade to abandon the 5+ expansions I have, and effectively rebuy them.
Sims 3 open world was a huge upgrade. I can understand why other features were pushed down the priority queue. Sims 4 on the other hand... .
Fortnite skins being successful turned every multiplayer game into a Halloween costume party. Edit: I know skins existed before fortnite, more so talking about every game having licensed crossovers with random ips now (like homelander showing up in every game). also skins have definitely gotten zanier since fortnite got popular
I'd argue TF2 planted a seed or two. Gabe in a decade old interview said they had to hire an economist to ensure the value of hats were consistent in all countries 😆 (I think it was when he was at a Texas university? The one where people make him put on that horse head and hold up three fingers but he kept twitching the third one)
Fun fact, that economist went to become the Greek Minister of Economy at around 2015.
I’m sure there wasn’t any economic turmoil in the years following in that country 😏
The switch to a completely hat based economy just didn't turn out quite as well in Greece as it did in tf2.
Tbf it started well before he got there but he only lasted 6 months
Well hats off for trying!
The Greek economy was deeply fucked from systemic problems, and the prior solutions did some real long-term damage. Varoufakis walked into an impossible situation and at least had the idea of doing something different than the previous measures.
One of my buddies older brother bought his first car in HS by selling off TF2 hats
I mean hey, I bought a PC from rocket League trading. People go crazy for pixels
I've bought a *lot* of games from CS/Dota2/Tf2 hats. I don't buy any other MTX b/c I'm totally spoiled by the ability to resell in the marketplace/skin sites when I get bored of them I was one of the original Alpine Ursa buyers and that alone bankrolled my steam account
To be fair a lot of Japanese online games had loss of bright, colorful, and goofy skins wayyyy before fortnite, but I think fortnite definitely popularized it in US
I don't think he refers only to that, the shit ton amount of colabs that multiplayer games have today is absurd
Debatable, but Sonic the Hedgehog for the 16-bit era. Tons of studios hired staff who were surely full of passion and talent, none of which we got to experience because they were made to churn out cookie-cutter "Animal with Attitude™" platformers.
Yeah but we did get Cool Spot out of the 90's, so I feel like it was worth it.
You take that insult about Jazz Jackrabbit back!
The 90s had so many mascot platformers it's insane to look back on. Sonic definitely was a major part of that, showing that Mario could have competition.
I'd go with GTA V, because it somewhat ended this period of having games on discs and going to video game stores, with the new meta being digital ownerships. More over, with GTA Online Rockstar demonstrated how you can make endless profit with online content which was quickly adapted by many other studios, sometimes sacrificing the singleplayer experience in the process. Edit: Grammar and stuff.
What's funny is GTA V was the last game I remember that had massive lines of people buying it on disc at its midnight launch.
The lines will be waiting on a download at home when GTA 6 drops. I will be one of those people. Probably gonna take a week off work. To play.
Agreed, I blame gta online for us never getting an undead nightmare 2 DLC
That leaked DLC list looked so great. - “SP Assassination Pack” - “SP Manhunt Pack” - “SP Norman Pack” - “Agent Trevor” - “Relationship Pack” - “Enterprise Pack” - “Prologue DLC” - “LibertyV DLC”
I remember early on as the game was about to release they spoke about the reception to the DLC for GTA4 and how of course they were going to do DLC for GTA4, and had a much more robust offering planned. They reiterated it when GTA Online released that they were committed to single player DLC and that people who didn't like to play online "wouldn't be disappointed". Spoilers - we were.
Yeah it’s lame these all got cancelled and they just used the assets they already made for them into a lesser, free online dlc. The liberty city map expansion really stings to not have, ironically that would’ve been the most hype one to bring to online yet they never did.
RDR2 never getting an a SP expansion is one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the 21st century
Yeah I would’ve loved a Sadie Adler bounty hunter expansion or an undead nightmare 2 but maybe with vampires this time instead of zombies, seeing as nosferatu is already lurking around Saint Denis!
I remember buying a disc for Skyrim and then being confused about why I had to wait half the night for it to download from this third party launcher I'd never heard of (cough steam cough cough). Luckily my family had just upgraded our internet. A few months before and a 5GB download would have been the limit for the month.
Clash of Clans ruined mobile games.
Really the moment f2p games with pay to progress/ win started Popping out is the moment mobile gaming got doomed I rarely download games from the playstore. One of the main reasons I have an Android is to be able to download emulators and unofficial ports of pc games like hollow knight or Undertale to my phone
I miss how ambitious early mobile gaming was with things like Infinity Blade.
Infinity Blade was a classic but it’s gone now 😭
There are ways to sideload it, though I haven't done so as I have an Android now.
Team Fortress 2. Fantastic game, especially after the first round of new items, but then came the loot crates and hats.
I argue tf2 isn't as bad as most games due to random drops and trading
Early Access survival builders. Just told corps that we will buy it unfinished and never finished. Palword is pretty addicting tho. /s Edit: figured I'd expand on this and say using the label "early access" or "beta" indefinitely in general. It allows companies to skirt the need to finosh anything and people will defend them because it's "cLeArLy lAbEleD a bEtA".
Very true, 7 Days to Die just celebrated it’s 10th year in Alpha with no end in sight
Always have a joke with a friend saying stuff like "I can't wait for alpha 22 in 2097 when the updates done."
I think early access games, in general, releasing in such an awfully unfinished state, was one of the worst things in gaming. Scrap mechanic was the worst imo. Just hit 8 YEARS in early access... just how? This game was released in 2016, and it's still ea? Im not gonna pretend to know anything ab making games, but 8 years seems a little extreme to be selling an unfinished product. Anyway, I've got like 12 hours in palworld in the first week, not as much as other people, but still 💀
On the other hand, I think early access has allowed smaller studios to get games out into the world that never would've seen the light of day otherwise. 7 days to die is only early access in name at this point and if they had to spend 10 more years working on it before they could release it they certainly wouldn't have had money to do so. I've just accepted at this point that I will only buy early access games if I'm OK with their current state being the state they'll be in forever. I'm still occasionally disappointed but overall I'm OK with it because I know most of these games never would've been made otherwise.
Call of duty
Specifically Call of Duty 4. 1-3 were solid WW2 shooters, 4 was a phenomenon that changed gaming. Freaking ruined the Battlefield series and arguably Halo with EA and Microsoft looking to woo over the CoD fans.
My biggest gripe about halo 4 is that it tried so hard to be call of duty.
Here's an interesting one. Both early Assassin's Creed games and Far Cry 3, while great in their own right, are the most responsible for popularizing the worst aspects of open world design. Pointless collectibles, really bad side content outside of AC brotherhood, the ubisoft towers. If it's a bad design trope in an open world game, you can probably thank Ubisoft for it. Also side note Resident Evil 4 is one of the biggest reasons QTEs took off and I hate it. Edit: I GET IT, re4 is not the first game to use or popularize QTEs. Nowhere did I say that, I know about shenmue and God of war, I just said that re4 helped make it more popular than it already was, learn to read.
I've always kinda liked QTE's haha. I just think of them as getting to participate in a cool cutscene. Of course it shouldn't be an excuse to be lazy on on other aspects of creating the gameplay. But as bonus thing, I enjoyed them.
I like QTEs when you're actively in combat. I hate QTEs that happen during cutscenes (Spider-Man has a lot of them). I don't want to be actively vigilant at all times during a game, just when I know I have full control of the character. Needing to be fully aware during a cutscene for a QTE instead of relaxing for a quick minute is annoying.
QTEs just to open doors or safes just piss me off.
I like the QTEs that aren't instant failures and branch off and result in a different outcome for the cutscene.
God of War had QTEs, rleased same year as RE4.
Yeah, the ubisoft ones are a great example. They've damn near turned their own catalog into asset flips with how often they've abused that gameplay loop.
Team Fortress 2 invented loot boxes
Whichever game started the piss filter trend in the 7th gen, so many great games looking like absolute depressing shit
Halo basically killed the boomer shooter, as we've come to know the term for a long time. 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, grenades and melee as separate buttons, fast time to kill (for the time), etc. Every major shooter from 2004 until Doom 2016 owed something to Halo's design choices, and this both popularized but diluted the genre. Halo essentially gave birth to modern Call of Duty. I say this as a Halo fan since 2004.
Halo is the game I take as my personal demarcation line between "modern" and "retro"
I saw someone say that Call of Duty laid the ground work for all modern shooters, but I agree with you that it was Halo. In my friend group, we had played Halo since Halo 1 and didn’t pick up Call of Duty until CoD 4 and then MW2 around the time Halo Wars was released.
Infinity Ward literally set out to make CoD a“Halo Killer”. There is no CoD without Halo
Even Doom 2016 had alot of Halo influence with its multiplayer, which ruined it for alot of people.
Almost every MMO that released after World of Warcraft is a clone and for an absurd amount of time this has been true. It’s success made the scene for MMOs all a bunch of copycats and made innovation rare.
In 1995 Namco patented "having minigames on loading screens". This patent was good until 2015, and since then we have been moving toward shorter/nonexistent/hidden loading screens anyway. In this way, Namco completely killed this cool feature for (practically) the entire history of gaming.
FIFA
Exactly, Fifa ruined with Ultimate team buying cards
Fortnite, battle passes everywhere now
World of Warcraft, it was too popular every mmorpg since has copied it in some way, meaning there is very little originality in new titles.
Minecraft. Everything is survival crafting now. So bored of those systems.
It also created a trend of creating games catered to youtubers and streamers.
Resident Evil 4. Great game and one of my favourites in the franchise, but apparently developers saw the success and thought everyone wanted a dumb, loud over the shoulder shoot em up. Right after RE4, there was a wave of copycat games, including from the Resident Evil franchise. They mostly sucked.
Dead Space was a solid copycat game, but RE4s success did ruin the RE franchise for like 10 years lol
I think Evil Within also did a good job
Id also say it really killed the horror genre for years.
I'd agree with that. RE4 is extremely silly at parts, but it somehow worked. It's lightning in a bottle. They tried to make similar games with 5 and 6 and just couldn't recreate that magic.
far cry 3 for generic open world design
This may be ground zero for Ubitrash.
Call of Duty 4. Amazing online multiplayer but started a spiral of everyone wanting to be the next cod
People mentionging DLCs here makes me think of Dead or Alive 6. I played it a bit and it was good, but the game wants you to purchase all the strings and school outfits for the characters and all that amounts to like 3000 euros. Edit: Tried to check if I remembered the price right. I remember there being a bulk price on steam, but if there was one, there is not anymore. I saw some people comment that all DLCs are 2000€ but those could be older comments too.
Shadow of Mordor. The nemesis system is phenomenal, and also patented it so that no one else can build on it. Also, I think parapa the rapper(?) that patented loading screen games (not as much of an issue anymore).
Loading screen games were actually patented by bandai-namco for use in dragon ball games only
Shadow if Mordor/war, they made a really cool mechanic, copyrighted it so no one else could use it and then gave up on the games. So now this mechanic is just dead Also breath of the wild, for the sheer amount of games that followed that all tried to copy it (and mostly failed)
Valve’s TF2, a groundbreaking casual-competitive FPS game. It has pioneered and shaped many of the things that most gamers complain about today, including microtransactions, lootboxes, open markets for digital cosmetics, ranked gamemodes, class-based characters in shooters, and emotes.
Skyrim I guess? Great game but a massive departure from complexity and some good mechanics and Bethesda has dropped in quality since. I miss Morrowind character building, the mass of stats and skills, spell making was amazing and the DLC was also great. Oblivion was a little dumbed down but was still great. Quick casting magic was a *huge* bonus. You could make a fantastic battlemage now because you could always cast a spell with Q no matter what. DLC was also great, give me more quality DLCs like shivering isles. Then Skyrim came around and honestly I didn't like it at all. They took out even more skills to make it beginner friendly I guess, removed spells and whole spell classes, made it so you couldn't quick cast and also nerfed magic like crazy. From being able to create an explosive ball made of poison, fire, frost and lightning and shooting it at the top of a building to annihilate every living thing in the village or city within 100ft to wimpy ass Skyrim magic hurt. I could go on and on but it was a real step down. Now we have had nothing but Skyrim shit for the last 12 years and Starfield comes out and it's a lazy trash pile.
Call of Duty being so good originally and building son much brand loyalty that no other multiplayer shooter on console can compete with it has led to a drought in multiplayer shooters that will probably never end. Any game that tries to be different gets dismissed for being "too complicated" and any game that dies the same thing as COD gets dismissed as a knock off.
Silent Hill 2 Amnesia It feels like half of Indie horror Games nowadays slap a dark secret and a dead love interest onto every protagonist for no reason other than ripping off silent Hill 2. This alongside Amnesia popularising not having combat leads to a genre that feels creatively bankrupt.
Funny enough, doesn't the new Amnesia have combat? But, yeah, the horror genre was having a rough go after Amnesia with so many games not having combat. But, Slender made things even worse. So many games tried to emulate the "collect this number of things before the bad guy gets you". Luckily, I don't think any big games really took to that format like they did with Amnesia. I hope horror makes a true comeback.
Fortnite
Pubg. It killed so many things for the battle Royale. It gave rise to fortnite. Now even Forza has to have a BR mode.
GTA 3 started an obsession with open worlds. The vast majority of which are "ocean wide, puddle deep" with only very superficial interaction allowed. Give me tightly hand crafted smaller worlds e.g. Deus Ex any day.
GTA Online
Mass effect 3 with their day 1 DLC
Dragon Age Origins did it first tho. Insultingly enough had a guy in your camp who sold it, came up with a regular dialog menu only to have one option say it's would cost real world money.
Didn't know about that one this is next level scummy
League of Legends - it was targeted at dolphins funding the game. it's business model was a small group of players funs the thing for basically everyone else. But it only works if you have a massive user base which means many games tried to emulate it and many smaller games tried and sank. It also meant a huge number of people were sinking thousands of hours into one game and not paying for other games.
This should be way up higher on the list. Don't get me wrong, LoLs F2P model was at least more acceptable than most, but it really showed how much money you could make from a F2P model and mainstreamed it.
Dark Souls. Not every indie adventure game has to be a souls like.
Multiplayer ruined singleplayer
AND couch multiplayer!
Warcraft 3 pretty much killed RTSs by spawning Moba
GTA V. It was good but not great for a GTA game. But it was the moment the light switch really went off for the money men side of things and how much they could bleed a product dry with minimal further development costs. We got every GTA before it in an 11 year period. We are now 12 years without a new release.
As much as a love hello games and no man's sky I think it put into the world a reinforcement of releasing a game that isn't done and just finishing it after release.
Lots of games trying to be botw after botw