If you had to pick one video game that was responsible for the decline of the gaming industry what would it be?

chess

Portal 1 was actually good, though. It just had shitty jokes and it was too short.

I would say Bioshock.

Simply put, mediocrity is fine when it's passed off as mediocrity. It's just when hipster faggots start praising mediocre as good because they miss the point or don't know what good is, that's when things start spiraling down.

Same thing happened with Skyrim, a fun little comfy game to play/mod when you're bored and not in the mood for anything more intense was hailed as the best game of all time by people who don't any damn better. And now look where we are. Fucking ZELDA, the grandaddy of open-world design, is copying off of Skyrim.

I swear, if every industry was like this one, you'd see hipsters writing long and positive reviews over fucking Backyard Burger just because their burgers aren't sloppy and nasty like McDonald's.

One console though. NES. It was responsible for blurring the difference between PC games and Arcade games, therefore dumbing down both.

Big Bang Theory. I don't think videogames had anything to do with the decline, I think it was the normalization of nerd culture.

By extension of that, we can probably blame twitter for existing and facebook opening up to literally fucking everyone instead of just college kids.

yep, that shit was the biggest mistake ever. It has ruined so many creative works.

Yeah, Bioshock really did bring out a ton of pseudo-intellectuals.

For as cancerous as those are, they aren't video games. May as well just start talking about everything wrong with society if you want to go there.

This.

And I would say AssCreed, Halo 3 and COD4, while Bioshock pulled the pseudo-intellectual fedoras, these pulled the dudebros, and dudebros pull women.

I don't think any game of those three is explicitly awful, COD4 started the modern military shooter and the "OOH SO REALISTIC" bullshit, Halo started the "playing vidya to hang out and talk" bullshit, and AssCreed was the first Ubisoft open world shitfest. It's like the ultimate shitty trifecta.

Super Mario Bros because it got kinds into video games.

NES was a mistake.

Half-Life, and i'm not talking just about HL2.

Half-Life redditified PC Gaming forever and was only praised for it's hype. TFC wasn't bad though

Obligatory

ASSFAGOTS, or WC3 because it caused assfagots to be a thing and also led to wow

blizzard could still be a relatively small company making rts's rather than all this other bullshit.

but number one its this Pro Gaming bullshit, that leads to streamers witch brings in a bunch of people who just want the game to look good and have a good "story" and for it to be JUST SO WACKY because that is what gets a stream going more than anything else. and of cource all the casual faggots that every company has to cater to rather than the core fanbase. SC2, skyrim, fallout 4, witcher 3 all those other games that where changed to carter to the masses rather than fans of the series. as every investor wants to make the next COD or WOW as they refuse to allow developers to innovate and make something fun and different. instead they cater to faggots who are fucking shit at video games. god help us when it actually becomes taboo for games to allow the player to lose. as every game is stuck on easy mode, where everyone gets a god dam trophy. well hopefully this will all crash and all will be purged.

Games were certainly not responsible for it but as others have said, it was normalfags coming into our domain (and the internet).

WC3 was great, it's not WC3's fault that the modders were, and remain, huge faggots incapable of producing anything good.

ignoring wow, for starters

but alot of those custom maps where grate fun games that where innovative with the rts formula and plenty of not dota games.

Halo

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
It was the breaking point, and with all the hype it got i remember very well it was out of nowhere
No one was expecting a big hit, it simply came out one day and everyone was shitting their pants
And i meant everyone "game journalism", everyone was forced to comply in a world where big media hype and interest takeovers weren't so well known, no suspicious thinking when all big sites said it was the real Halo killer

But it was a vast amount of factors, many of which came in 2007
"Web 2.0" like many have coined it, the more easy-access and mainstream way of how websites handled at certain point, catering to the masses, was the reason casuals came by, they saw what the real vidya user base was all about in its front, just a bunch of shy guys having fun, joking and talking about anything while being relatively good natured
A "safe place" for the weak, thin-skinned young people

This helped attract a never ending cancer.

I don't know if it influenced anything but this game was the wake up call for me: f2p mmo shit is here to stay.

Amnesia the Dark Descent

I would have to agree with this. MW brought over all the normalfag chads because of MODERN COMBAT in the M.E. didn't help that the US was very into "support the troops"
Portal was what made geek "culture" accessible to the casuals and grills yelling the cakes a lie line. Mw2 didn't help at all. I remember some dumb bitch trying to tell me she plays mw2 and gets the high ks, like it makes you a hardcore 1337 gamer. But this was before tumblr so she was probably testing the waters for how to acquire orbiters

steam sales created a pricing race to the bottom, but nobody wants to dare mention wanting to pay more than a dollar

Halo, it made 2 gun limits and regenerating health the standard, regenerating health was really just a more streamlined version of regenerating shields which was a pretty bad system already. Half-life may have redditfied the PC userbase but at least it brought a few good things to the table with its gameplay and was a pretty good game overall, somewhat overrated and responsible for scripted sequences becoming the norm but still fun to play if you could get past the huge unskippable sequence at the beginning.
Halo CE's biggest sin is that it created trends that ruined its respective genre while at the same time having absolutely nothing to show for it asside from its AI but the challenge that presented to players was rendered near non-existant by the regenerating sheilds anyway and it didn't make up for the slow, easy, and tiresome gunplay, the clunky and frustrating to control vehicles, or the poor level design(and no I'm not just talking about the library, virtually all the levels past the 3rd one in the campaign were bad).
And why exactly is the fact that halo both created bad trends and was itself an overall mediocre at best game so bad? Its bad because while I doubt that halo was the first bad game to achieve widespread popularity and sell well, there is no denying the fact that its sales showed publishers everywhere that they don't even need to bother making their games good. Just pump a ton of money into marketing and then normalfags will eat it up if it manages to go so far as to even approach mediocrity. Halo paved the way for the call of duty series. Without it there may never have been a call of duty ghosts and worst case scenario the fps genre would have been spared from halo and cod clones for at least a few months if not years.
Runners up for shitty game responsible for the decline of the gaming industry are, lol, wow, and half life series but I would blame hl2 moreso than 1 because it made REFERENCES LMAO a standard. Hl2 was just a bad sequel, okay game, but it didn't bring anything new to the table and the first game is clearly superior

You are forgetting Medal of Honour back in the day when it was the biggest shooter
CoD1 is a big rip-off of MoH in general, while MoH itself was a more "realistic" Wolfenstein
And by your factors Half-Life 2 is just as bad because even Halo 2 speeded up its gameplay, put more variety and more weapons, unlike Half-Life 2 who also made cinematic experiences more well known and also opened the market for more rehashes
Yes, i'm saying Valve made one game and reskinned it 4 times, that's as lazy as you can get (along with Rockstar making 2 GTA's in 3D, 3 and SA, the rest are reskinned versions until VCS)

why ;_;

7th Gen consoles in general and the internet focus as well.

Almost forgot

Also WoW

It also saved the American videogame market dumbshit.

That was already out when the industry shat itself
It just brought more and more casuals in, a population so casual they don't even play videogames other than it

And now people are taking influences from it to other games.

this fucking game NTR'd all of my counter-strike buddies away from me in freshman year of high school and it was a gigantic piece of shit

fuck this game

It was the FFVII of its time

It'd be something out of Halo, COD4, TF2 (after the microtransactions/F2P), KOTOR, Oblivion, or Assassin's Creed.

out of all of those I think I'll have to pick KOTOR. Aside from not actually being a good game and having shit writing, it started the trend of RPGs becoming "cinematic" with arbitrary morality systems, fully voiced dialogue (means choice and consequence become limited by memory/budget), and of course oversimplified RPG mechanics/combat compared to what came before it.

What's your reasoning behind portal?

was it really worth saving?

It really depends, it would either be raplaced with some other console or IBM PCs would rule.

This is the game that brought out the fucking youtube cancer. Not the dev's fault, game is okay for what it is, just that it popularized the screaming face cam bullshit.

video games

Not a game.
It's 2007.
Everything points to this year. This year is the reason the industry is a circus.

2007 was when the decline began due to the crisis, technology and internet boom, demand for escapism and a new generation of kids.

Still some nice games thought, 2009 was when devs and consumers alike went full retard and many AA companies died due to that.

What the fuck happened. I swear to God, it must've been some sort of meme magic fuckery that went down hard that year.

new vidya: discover the conspiracy behind 2007

I blame mobile gaming and the extreme popularity of smartphones, not any single video game.

the smartphone gave the average sub-100 IQ normalfag super-easy access to the internet, and allows them to shitpost on the internet and play shitty mobile games at any time of the day, even while at work or school where normalfags spend most of their lives. the smartphone was the first gaming device simple enough for the majority of women to use. it was responsible for bringing women into gaming, which immediately started the decline of gaming.

I'd say that BBT, COD MW, and facebook were the biggest ones here

BBT made it cool to be nerdy, and paved the way for the rise of the hollywood comic book movies.

COD MW was a casual game that pretty much boils down to hide and seek / who sees who first except that it pretends to be a much more hardcore game, meaning that casuals can play it while thinking that they are "hardcore"

And of course Facebook is what helped all this spread since it was a social media platform that didn't make you a nerd to use and acted as a gateway to the rest of the internet.

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Those tbh, fam.

Custom games were great you faggot. DOTA doesn't represent the majority of them.

Yeah, a short physics puzzle game with writing and therefore eventual memes in it I've watched multiple girls play in person and fail so miserably at, it made me question if all women were mentally retarded.
No

I'd pick Halo.
Without the armor regeneration of Halo, Call of Duty 2 probably wouldn't have had regenerating health.
Halo 2 a year after CoD2 wouldn't be a thing that also helps popularize regenerating health.
This negates a mass influx of casual shooters.
Nice upside is that without it Red vs. Blue never becomes a thing and machinima in general is at least stunted along with lets plays.

"Gamer 2.0" (competitive alphamale retard casuals) don't ruin the industry.
They continue to give their whores the attention they feed off of and so they "Gamer 3.0" (insufferable cunts) don't seek it from streaming their tits and complaining about a male dominated entertainment industry.

There would still be a lot of problems.
The housing bubble still pops in 07.
Trendsetting twats start shopping at goodwill.
"Geek Chic(shek)" still comes about like it or not.
Aptly named because any "geek" worth his salt intake were known for caring little about fashion and more about putting money into their hobbies.
The industrial revolution of the industry to a mainstream market still happens all the same, perhaps just a little bit slower.
Long enough for maybe a few more high quality games to be made.

I don't blame games so much for creating casuals as much as outside factors that created a more gaming susceptible market.
The ease and accessibility brought about by social media and smartphones.
G4/Tech TV and Spike TV.
Popularizers that helped a mainstream market come about.

Everything made in 2014 and 2015

Ironic shitposting is still shitposting

God Of War

Ironic tripfagging is still tripfagging

The worst part about Portal is that it embodied a lot of good things but those things were overblown and twisted into a lot of terrible trends that still persist to this day. The irony is that the hipster fags of current year don't even seem to remember or pay honor to it. The reason being is that they're a worse cancer, people without roots and no rhyme or reason to go by. They seek to redefine gaming into something complete blank and without an identity to go by. More irony is that Portal is a step up from the status quo and what it stood for is a better alternative to the hipster SJWs offerings.

That ain't Batman Begins/Spiderman 1/2

You've lost me completely, you believe nobody got together at eachother's houses to play video games and that a trend of doing so is somehow bad?

Nothing to do with the conversation but I fucking hated that game. I hate any game that makes you not able to see shit because they want to mesmerize you with a fucking light FOV. -and then if you can't navigate a maze of hallways like a champ then the game is you you extra blind and constantly at 5/100 HP with added surfaces that try to sap that little bit away. Horror games or games that try to otherwise tease your emotions through gameplay mechanics are better at just pissing me off more than anything else.

I really need to look into The Question, I loved that guy in Justice League Unlimited.

I can't name one specific game, but I can name one specific trait that causes games to degrade, or atleast to be less than what they could be.

Any game that has less, or does less, than its predecessors. Wether its predecessors are decades old, or wether they aren't made by the same company, there is no excuse for games to have less features as time goes on. There should only be an increase in quantity and quality as devs learn from the mistakes of other devs, and add that which others have come up with into their own game.

This piece of shit.

League of Legends for bringing MOBAs into popularity

Barring that, Fez (and the rigged awards it received that massively popularized it) for making bland, boring pixelshit mainstream. That Phil Fish cancelled a sequel to a game whose near-entirety he stole and now works as a no-clientele DJ is sweet retribution but didn't come soon enough.

I feel like it was the first casualized game aimed at children

but vanilla wow was pretty much just a dumbed down clone of everquest that looked better, on its own it didnt really do anything to gaming. it popularized mmos, sure, but look what's happened to that market now. mmos are starting to die out honestly.

WE HAVE TO GO FARTHER

This is a pretty big one. Loads of shit mechanics + massive in the industry.

Tennis for Two

Dont know about the decline of the industry but defiantly responsible for the damage done to the FPS genera.

The first halo didnt have regening health.

It popularised the go sit in a corner for a bit mechanic with its regen shields, it also gave us the cancerous 2 weapon bullshit.

Doom

The shields led to the health.

As much as i love it that title goes for Goldeneye, even if the campaign was superior everyone played it for the multiplayer
Halo 1 didn't have online multiplayer, only the PC version did
Only after Halo 4 people started to copy it, but by this time Counter Strike was the bomb thanks to it being shipped with Half-Life

3 years later it was CoD who made everyone shoehorn online multi AND ignore local multi, games who had no reason to have multi now had a chunk of the budget subjected to it and for what reason, only for it to die a month later
This happened to Assault on Dark Athena, a game who was almost cancelled because the publisher didn't like it was single player, and when they threw money at the online the publisher didnt like it and cancelled the project because it was stealth oriented and not bullet madness

Oblivion casualized Elder Scrolls and opened it up to the terrible fanbase it has today. Skyrim is merely a symptom of Bethesda's overall decline.

Oblivion also released just before the big nerd culture explosion in 2007 and rode that wave for record sales.

As much as I love it, Halo.

I do.

If anyone ever wonders why all the PC exclusives went multiplat to consoles:

Steam pricing. The race to the bottom with Steam sales forced pubs to look elsewhere for revenue.

Halo started the trend of lowest common denominator gaming. This started about every bad trend in the industry

Did they really? It seems things are on PC more than ever.

PC is not centralized platform. And the Direct Xbox was pretty much a computer that set the groundwork for future closed garden computers, aka consoles in the post PS2 era

Who wouldn't want to sell their games to a bigger audience?

the xbox in general started the decline. Everything gaming related microshit touches turns to period blood and pig assholes.

Whatever game started the trend of gritty, realistic shooting involving bald space marines where games couldn't be colorful and cartoony and wacky anymore, but had to be SERIOUS BUSINESS brown and grey all the time. Or at least, gritty brown and grey was the only thing that got a decent budget anymore.

So my vote's on Halo, seems like that cemented that crummy shootan game tradition. Also it was big with the dudebros and pushed people being more into shooters for the PvP than the singleplayer campaign, which didn't help either.

Portal wasn't the cause of shitty reddit memefags, it was the redditors that just took it too far. I bet you fucking liked it when it came out too, faggot.

hownewr.u

He's a really fun character, especially the episode with him, Supergirl, and Green Arrow. Also gotta love how he handles the parademons in the final episodes. I really wish JLU didn't get cancelled.

I also wish that Beware the Batman wasn't cancelled too, that show was great.

There used to be big games exclusive on PC. Now everything will get a console port.

That's a good point. People here like to say how consoles are dead but fact of the matter is: no dev is going to ignore a potential audience of 40 million ps4s.

With the current architecture developing games for multiple systems is easier than ever.

Examples: Divinity, Banner Saga, Talos principle.

Deeper OP, think deeper.

Fallout 3

Pic related also shifted focus of AAA titles away from gameplay and onto the "experience". Moving storytelling away from gameplay and onto (poorly written) cutscenes, having flashy advertising blitzes with no mention of how it plays.

Was there ever any doubt?

Pong

This proved the skinner box method of MP would sell to any faggot. Not only did that ruin MP games unless you were willing to spend hours earning a good weapon in each game you wanted to play (not possible if not a neet/child) but it was a short step from that to F2P nonsense.

Oh and while the SP campaign wasn't terrible it sparked the 'cinematic' trend too.

Oh well.

Final evidence: guess what year it came out?
2007

wow a shit

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't HL2 the game that popularized the merging of cut-scenes and story telling?

HL1 did the same thing.

Bullshit.

The rise of Steam was a result of publishers and physical stores slowly abandoning PC as a market. The only reason it survived its shitty launch was how much better it was than the competition (and yes, it really was).

I can remember going into Game every few months and every fucking time the PC section shrunk until it was a shitty little shelf that was mostly just WoW and The Sims. I can also remember EA, Ubi etc claiming year on year PC gaming was dying. This abandonment is what drove Steam and the same companies now bitch and complain about their market dominance. I have no sympathy.

Steam, ofc, has its own issues and has been getting more and more jewish but what can you do?

lolno The only reason Steam survived is by being forced on Valve fans with HL2 and CS.

The reaction during the HL2/CS period was massively negative.

Most people might have given in and installed it but it was used only for the games that needed it. Hell I refused and stayed on Xfire for a good few years.

What eventually drove them as a popular place to get shit was the terrible state of physical stores, at least in the UK/Europe (can't speak for the USA but I gather the situation wasn't as bad there).

I watched everyone I knew eventually adopt it out of convenience, not coercion. Gabe might be a jewish old fuck now but he was right when he said piracy was a service issue and customers will always use a service that is more convenient for them.

Also on the subject of sales: it is well known that things like the summer sale actually make more money for publishers/devs than do average day to day sales outside of the first month of release.

I say all this not to defend Valve who, again, I disagree with nowadays (stopped buying things through Steam outright in fact) it's just Holla Forums's attempts at historical revisionism are always bullshit.

Microsoft didn't make the PS2, bud
But i agree they accelerated paid online bound to happen anyway), the rest was just a bomb ticking
Also the Xbox was doing OK without Halo, OK taking into account it sold at a lost

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You're wrong. There are no cutscenes in the entire game.

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wasn't minecraft made in 2010? The decline started way before then. I'd say as early as the late 1999/1998's but the decline didn't pick up serious traction till 2004. Then in 2007 the shit really hit the fan.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

the question isn't whether or not the game or the company that made it was successful, the question is if it was THE game that destroyed gaming and i dont think wow destroyed anything.

now you really gotta stop and think about all those wow clones for a moment right, all those mmos. did any single one of them take off to an extent that it made a difference, besides wow itself? pretty much people would try them for a month or two then come back to wow, every single time. the market that wow spawned was a market consisting almost entirely of its own game. it's a self-sustaining loop that didnt actually seep out into anything else really.

this is the only point you make that could at all affect the gaming market as a whole, but reallyit wasnt cool to be a geek chick until years later (2007) as people have elaborated in this thread and others. wow didn't do anything more for that than any other game at the time. if you really really wanna go back, even before 2007 the earliest pop-culture gaming meme was with the south park episode "make love not warcraft" in 2006, which yes was linked to wow and showed how popular the game was, but that episode actually did more to damage gaming than the game itself did.

Dinosaur Hunter. It caused developers to abandon what they were good at in pursuit of imagined easy riches.

Really, it's not specific games that are the problem, but companies looking to follow fads without having the ability to do a competent job at it: 3d, online, vr. You can even see how the success of Panzer General caused a bunch of companies to ruin their games because they had no idea how to blend leveling up into their games. And this led to a general trend of studios failing at cross genre ideas.

I still really like the fist Bioshock. Not for the story so much, and the last boss was really stupid, but I like the world. I like how it looks and I liked finding out about it. Even if it's just System Shock in the water.

I can understand why people wouldn't like it though.

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Not only that, but minecraft really only plagued youtube and the xbox live arcade.

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What was the first game Bioware ever made? I blame it on that one.

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You can stop pretending

I completely blame Bioware for shitting up video games by starting. Hello Biofag.

You can stop pretending now, it's for your own good

You can stop pretending now.

Too bad Baldur's Gate is shit.

This right here.
Horse Armor DLC? Laughable.
But it showed people were willing to pay for microtransactions in games, and its been all downhill ever since

Bonus: Oblivion released in 2006, so the horse armor must have premiered around that magical 2007.

World of Warcraft, obviously. WoW ruined everything. Not just MMOs, as embed shows, but it opened the floodgates that also led to the f2p-p2w model (for any MMOs to be able to survive in the post WoW world) and subsequently mobile insanity later on.

op couldn't be more faggy if they tried

That Holla Forums is full of hipsters? Of course not!

I really hope the industry decides to take some game Holla Forums loves and copies it till it's run into the ground so all you hipsters disown it like the contrarian faggots you all are.

>implying anyone on Holla Forums isn't one of these two

gone homo

the race to the bottom spawned day one dlc, f2p, and all the other kikery in the industry today

minecrap is a symptom, not the cause

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the PS3. Every normalfag bought a PS3

If it hasn't dawned on you that this has happened multiple times already then you are just as clueless as Holla Forums is.