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.
