Ten years gone
A look back at the landmark moments that shaped a truly remarkable decade in videogames
Celebrating the landmark moments of the past decade
The size of the Google doc into which the Edge family threw ideas for this feature speaks volumes about the absurd clip at which the game industry moves. There has never been a truly quiet decade in videogames, but the past one was surely the busiest yet. It was one in which the traditional ruling class found themselves fighting not just each other for the spoils, but a host of new arrivals too. Traditional business models, development methods and marketing strategies were upended; players grew more invested, both emotionally and financially, in games than ever before. This was a tremendous decade for games, certainly. We’ll get into that later this issue. But it was also a fascinating, often terrifying, transformative ten years for the industry around them. Over the pages that follow, we run down what we consider the defining events, investments, rulings and fallouts of the 2010s.
ACCURATE PREDICTION
Back in 2011, the name Tencent carried little weight in the west. The Chinese investment firm was looking to bolster the games on offer in its instant-messagingclient-turned-game-store, QQ, and looked to the west for inspiration. It had acquired a 22 per cent stake in Riot Games, developer of League Of Legends, in 2008, before the game had even launched. In 2011, it raised its stake in the company to a little under 93 per cent for $230 million. Talk about the Minecraft deal all you want (we intend to, don’t worry) but this was surely the deal of the decade, given League has brought in some $20 billion in revenue globally to date.
It also laid the groundwork for a decade of Chinese investment in the western game industry. Selling up to Tencent didn’t just give Riot’s existing shareholders a payday; it gave League access to the largest audience of videogame players on the planet, since you can’t do business in China without a local partner company. Tencent now has significant investments, and several majority stakes, in western game firms; so do the likes of fellow Chinese publishers NetEase and Perfect World. Expect this to be a recurring theme into the 2020s and beyond. China is simply too big to ignore.
DEATH OF A MIDDLE MAN
When Nintendo announced a new initiative in which it planned to turn away from costly stage-managed press events in favour of pre-recorded video broadcasts, the industry rather rolled its shoulders. “This marks a new endeavour,” said NOA president Reggie Fils-Aimé, opening the first Nintendo Direct broadcast on October 21, 2011. “Direct video news feeds designed just for you.” Sure pal, whatever. Wii was on its last legs, and 3DS was not off to a strong start; this felt like a company in retreat, cutting costs and removing an overly critical press from the picture.
Not for the first time during its years in the videogame business, it turns out Nintendo was laying down a template that others would eagerly follow. It proved that you don’t need to put 2,000 journalists in an arena to announce a new game and dominate the headlines, and that fans will log on to watch a broadcast at just about any time of day. It’s a bandwagon the wider industry has happily hitched itself to. Sony’s recently launched State Of Play is the most overt homage, but it’s telling that, when Google took to YouTube to properly kick off its streaming pitch with the inaugural Stadia Connect, the first thing viewers saw was an exec, Phil Harrison, standing against a white background, just as Fils-Aimé had done seven-and-a-half years earlier.
POWER BOMB
Hey, we didn’t say all of this was good news for the industry. Mass Effect 3 launched in March 2012 to what we believe is technically termed an absolute shitstorm. While reviews had generally been positive, fans of the series were outraged at the way BioWare dropped the curtain on the beloved trilogy, thinking it a mess that lacked closure and undermined (or outright ignored) the choices players had made over the course of the series. Bluntly, things got out of hand. “It just snowballed like crazy,” reflected BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn in 2016, “and pretty soon
Not for the first time, Nintendo was laying down a template that others would eagerly follow
the whole issue was on fire.” Not only does that betray Flynn’s troubling misunderstanding of the elements; it was also quite an understatement.
Mass Effect 3 is not on this list for that – though this was, in many ways, the decade of the videogame shitstorm. Rather it is for how BioWare and publisher EA reacted. The Extended Cut, which replaced the original ending, was hurriedly assembled and released for free within four months of the base game’s release. This was a tipping point. It suggested to a certain corner of the gaming internet that, if they just made enough noise – more specifically, if they launched a vociferous enough hate campaign – they might just get their way. It remains an issue today, and likely will for years to come.
GARAGE BAND
“It looks incredibly exciting,” Valve boss Gabe Newell said in a 2012 testimonial on the Kickstarter page of a project that seemed impossible. “If anybody’s going to tackle this set of hard problems, Palmer’s going to do it.” The story was romantic, the stuff of a Hollywood script: an obsessive 20-year-old had thrown together a prototype for a VR headset in his parent’s garage, and was asking for $250,000 to bring it to life, and to market. He got almost ten times that goal, and you know what happened from there. Consumer VR became an affordable reality; within two years of the Kickstarter’s launch, Luckey had sold Oculus to Facebook for $2.3 billion. Then he was revealed to be a 4Chan edgelord who’d been secretly funding a group making pro-Trump memes, but look, nobody’s perfect, are they?
FLEXIBLE FRIEND
Minecraft may have been the game that pioneered it and proved its potential, but it was Steam that brought the notion of selling games before they were finished to the mass market. Launching in March 2013 with an initial 12 games – among them the wondrous Kerbal Space Program – it kicked off perhaps the most significant change this decade has seen in terms of how developers can get their projects funded.
Sure, Valve was merely building on what came before, but Steam Early Access let small studios make their sales pitch on the largest marketplace for PC games in the west, and offered them full integration with the Steamworks API. It meant indie teams no longer needed to convince stuffy publishers of their game’s potential, nor sign over their IP rights for a deal; it offered a less risky alternative to Kickstarter, where you either raised enough money inside a month or went home empty-handed. You might fairly argue that its effect has been as much a negative as a positive – the ‘ship now, fix later’ approach has spread far beyond this corner of Steam, after all – but talk to any developer who’s seen a project improve by having pre-release access to a swathe of paying customers, and it’s clear the good far outweighs the bad.
DOG’S DINNER
“This aged like fine wine,” reads a recent comment on a video, ‘Xbox One Reveal 2013 Highlights’, that is 100 seconds long and has amassed 8.2 million views. It’s a deeply embarrassing supercut of every time a Microsoft exec says the words “television” or “TV” (51); every time EA’s Andrew Wilson says “sports” (16), and every time Activision’s
Eric Hirshberg says “Call Of Duty” (26). Back then, it was hilarious; it still is, but today it is also a succinct reference point for what it looks like when a multinational videogame company gets everything terribly wrong, and throws away an entire generation.
Microsoft’s original pitch for Xbox One was spectacularly out of step with what the audience of players it had amassed over the previous two generations wanted from a new Xbox. Sure, Microsoft’s entry into the console business had always been a Trojan horse for a broader assault on the living room; this made it explicit, a console that was all about Kinect-powered entertainment features (and Call Of Duty) with games seemingly a distant afterthought. The results were disastrous. Don Mattrick, then head of the Xbox division, was out of a job within six weeks. His replacement, Phil Spencer, has led a commendable rebuilding project, and Microsoft seems well poised as we head into a new generation next year. Surely it will never drop the ball like this again.
SHARE BUTTON
If Mattrick and co proved it was possible to lose a billion-dollar console generation in an hour, at E3 the following month Sony would prove you could win one in 20 seconds. Of all the concerns at the Xbox One announcement, one of the biggest was a persistent rumour that the console wouldn’t play used games. Microsoft’s response had been mealymouthed and unclear; at E3, Sony showed its rival how to do it. “This is how you share used games on PS4,” says
Consumer VR became an affordable reality; Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for $2.3 billion
Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, before handing a game box to dev relations VP Adam Boyes. “Thanks,” he replies, and both smile to the camera. These companies spend hundreds of millions conceiving, designing, manufacturing and signing software for their new consoles, a process that takes many years and has thousands of jobs at stake. Sony had the better hardware this time, certainly. But it won the battle for hearts and minds with a video that cost no more than a few quid, and took maybe 20 minutes to make.
TRADING PLACES
Two acquisitions in the space of a month rocked the industry in 2014. First, Amazon spent $970 million on Twitch, proving beyond doubt that, yes, there was money in sitting around and playing games all day. Within weeks Microsoft had given Markus ‘Notch’ Persson $2.5 billion for Minecraft, after which the game’s creator, who had never seemed one for the spotlight, outbid Jay-Z and Beyoncé for the most expensive mansion to ever be listed in the Hollywood Hills and began the next chapter in his life, as a sort of latter-day Howard Hughes.
Needless to say the two are linked, and not just for the enduring popularity of what is now Microsoft’s game on what is now Amazon’s video platform. Both cases have shown how difficult it is for corporate money to meaningfully change something that found success at a grassroots level. Both Minecraft and Twitch are defined by community, something that grows organically and has proven harder to monetise than they might have thought. Amazon’s stewardship of Twitch has largely been about finding new ways to separate viewers from their wallets; Microsoft has been a steady hand on the Minecraft tiller, but is moving to the next phase next year with Minecraft Dungeons and Earth. For both, the next decade will be fascinating.
NOT FORGOTTEN
We will never forget the look on the face on the one member of the Edge team to not have already heard the news: shock became sadness and then quiet devastation. Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, was dead at 55, having succumbed to a tumour in his bile duct. Did his passing define the decade? Was Nintendo, or the industry, changed forever by his loss? Perhaps not. But it was all so desperately sad – not something we feel often in games, and certainly not where Nintendo is concerned.
Iwata embodied the values of the Nintendo we all love: of bringing joy to players of all ages and skill levels, of taking risks, of a freewheeling design aesthetic carried out with laser precision.
In his speeches to developers – the highlight being his famous address to open GDC in 2011 – he was inspiring. In his Nintendo Direct appearances, he was playfully self-deprecating. We do not just miss him; we miss what he represented, and the sadness comes also from the fear we may never see his like at the head of a major game company again.
BOXING CLEVER
If this list seems a little frontloaded, well, that’s how decades work: you often can’t assess the true impact of something until it’s had time to actually have that impact, and perhaps if you asked us to try this again in five years this list would be very different. Yet the moment it handed down its ruling on videogame lootboxes in April 2018, the Belgian Gaming Commission booked its place in history.
Lootboxes are the apex – or the nadir – of one of the constant, and most awkward, narratives of this decade: that of the various ways in which developers and publishers have sought to continue to make money from their games long after the initial purchase. We’ve had DLC, season passes, cosmetics and episodic releases; all have had their success stories, and many more failures besides. The lootbox has been by far the most lucrative, and also the most controversial. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the lootbox’s effect on the industry came from an unnamed developer who’d worked on Ragtag, the codename for a singleplayer Star Wars action game Amy Hennig was making for EA. “She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” the developer told Kotaku. “EA executives are like, ‘ FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year. Where’s your version of that?’” Ragtag was cancelled, obviously.
We are especially sensitive, given the breadth of our readership, to issues such as this. We understand that players want to keep playing their favourite games, and that the new content to keep them playing costs time and money to make. But lootboxes were always a step too far, even before the infection spread, and we’re not convinced the industry can be trusted to properly regulate itself. The Belgian Commission was the first to outright declare lootboxes illegal. Chances are it will not be the last, but it deserves tremendous credit for having the bravery to be the first to take a stand.
We’ve had DLC, season passes and episodic releases; the lootbox has been by far the most controversial