The 10 defining gaming trends of the decade 2010-19

Games have evolved a lot since the start of the decade, here's what has lived (and died) since then.

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.

Editor-in-Chief

Chris is the captain of the good ship AllGamers, which would explain everything you're seeing here. Get in touch to talk about work or the $6 million Echo Slam by emailing chris.higgins@allgamers.com or finding him on Twitter. 

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