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Top Ten Dying Game Genres
Ant sent us a fun link to an article running over at GameSpy discussing the Top 10 Dying Game Genres. Although I don't think Puzzle games have died - I think they've transformed: Pikmin is just a fancy puzzle game, after all ;) But I still want Dr Mario for my GBA.
Galaga is still one of the greatest games ever!
Posting as directed.
I could have sworn that there were only about 5 or 6 genres total. FPS, strategy (both real time and not), puzzle, sport, RPG (which includes MMORPG), adventure epic, and simulation. If ten genres are dying, then in five years we won't be playing anything.
The graphic adventure game brings back lots of memories... Ahh... King's Quest VI, Quest for Glory I-IV, Full Throttle. Games that actually required thought to play. I really wish they would start (re)making some cool adventure games set in a 3D world (Unreal 2 engine anyone?) I mean, who could say no to 3D Day of the Tentacle?
Beatings will commence if towels continue to be eaten...
Real time strategy games!
No wait, I'm dreaming.
I was a huge RTS fan but the whole genre has been played out.
All of these genres seem like something that a young kid in the 80's grew up to. As the technology has advanced, so have the games. I mean you don't see any text based adventures anymore except with MUDs. The same with educational games. Many are still made but as we get older we tend not to play them anymore and therefore pay little attention to them.
I would have to agree with the puzzle genre dying. No one wants to slap down $50 when you can play the same game online for free. A puzzle game has to be more complex and have more detail than just moving blocks in order for me to buy it. I personally bought Pikmin and I loved it but I don't play it that often anymore.
Well, technically those are RPG's (MMORPG's, to be exact) There are differences :P
And yes, I want another space quest, damnit!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I am very surprised to see Tetris on this list. I had thought that Tetris was still very much alive. Perhaps it is just the geek background in which I work at college, but for some of the people I know, Tetris is the only game they play. Tetris still has versions coming out (mainly looks, not playability), but still, if there are new versions out, surely that must mean there is still some demand?
;-).
Duck Hunt is dying out? Perhaps. I have an old Win95 games CD with Gunboat DuckHunt on it. That was fun
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
Games continue to change form and adopt newer forms of graphics. But the best games have a solid foundation and rely on the graphics to tell the story and not to sell the game. Take a look at the list of top games at GameTab. Two Zelda's are in the Top 10 (at least right now). The new gameboy version is hanging onto a top spot while the seemingly controversial Wind Waker has snagged the supreme ranking. Wind Waker is in essence a new tale about Link built upon the foundations of the very first Zelda game for the NES. Nothing has really changed at the fundemental levels.
Notice the lack of PC games on the top 10. A few titles might be missing from the database but it might generally be assumed that a wider variety of titles exists for the consoles that are able to be appreciated by the broader audience. All of the games in the Top 10 are refinements upon a simple formula and many of them are sequels in name if not in spirit of old games.
The videogame industry has not quite run out of ideas like holiday has. It's a pretty darn good idea to be a gamer. If you're burnt out, buy a GameCube which is considered to be for the kiddies. And go make Kimiko happy!
I don't know why they say maze games are dying. Games such as Doom, Quake, Unreal, etc all utilize the basic maze strategy...albeit you have to frag your way through the maze, but it is still just a maze.
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Well,that doesn't mean they are dying. There are probably more gamers today playing puzzle games than ever before: you get them free with your computer, you can play them on-line (games.yahoo.com), you can play them on handhelds, etc.
So why are graphic adventures now seemingly a dead genre?
They don't seem to be--games like Myst are basically a graphic adventure game only that the graphics are better. So, for that matter, are many games that at first glance look like FPSs or RPGs (Half Life, Splinter Cell, etc.).
here are the genres that are supposedly dying:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time.
9. Puzzle
What??? Lot of people still plays solitaire... even minesweeper!
What might be happening is that there are not new types of puzzles...
8. Light Gun
They're not really dead as they weren't really alive... aside of some people playing on nintendos, there were not a really market for they. I always thaught that the problem was that there is only one way to play with this things... aim and shoot.
7. Text Adventure
They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
6. Maze
rrright, they died. But that is not a game genre, just a kind of puzzle.
5. Virtual Reality
Again, that's not a genre. I thing much of us would love to play a FPS with a helmet or somthing truly immersive... but most of us can't afford it, and (AFAIK) the real good ones are way too expensive
4. Educational
They would be right only if Educational games had ever been alive. But i still think that they would be a good idea
3. Full Motion Video
And then again... this is not a genre, it's just poor designed video games with a bad transition/gaming ratio...
2. Beat 'Em Up
They are right (at least!). RIP. We'll miss you (i loved double dragon).
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again. Why did Graphic adventures died? I really really enjoid Maniac MAnsion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island (I II & III)... why aren't new-3d-full-of-eye-candies-graphic-adventures? Perhaps there's a need for a new Roberta.
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
The really sad part of all this is that a few of the genres that are supposedly dying are the ones that were my favorites (text adventure, graphic adventure), and they were my favorites because they combined two things that I craved into one: A challenge to my intellect, and a game set in an engaging story or plot.
This is not to say I can't or won't play other games. It's simply that they do not hold my interest as much as the older genres I mentioned above. The real sad part is the fact that these genres have died or are dying because of the law of supply and demand. No one is demanding these games anymore, so no one is supplying them. That's the real sad part, IMHO.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
As was pointed out in an exchange highlighted on XYZZY News, you shouldn't confuse "noncommercial" with "dying". Just because game producers aren't putting millions of dollars into a genre, and aren't making millions of dollars, doesn't mean the genre is dying.
This is an important point that seems to be missed by most of the corporate gaming media. In fact, the fact that the gaming media doesn't seem to recognize that there's more to gaming than what corporate game producers are putting out is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the gaming industry.
Gamespy sort of highlights this when they're talking about puzzle games: why pay $50 for a puzzle game when you can download something for free? Well, that doesn't mean puzzle games are dying--far from it. It means that so many people are coding puzzle games for fun, and people are downloading them, that there's no need for a commercial industry. But plenty of people continue to play them.
The same thing is true of text adventures. It's true that text adventures maybe don't capture the same amount of attention from adolescent males that they once did. But to say that the genre is "dying" is ridiculous and, once again, based on the assumption that "living" means corporate profits. There are tons of text adventure sites, competitions, etc., out there, and plenty of games, both free and independently produced.
I would go so far as to argue that the health of a gaming genre is partially reflected in the extent to which the genre is able to transcend corporate commercial interests. That's not to say what corporations are releasing is all bad, just that in my mind, the gaming community would be better if there was more independent development of games. If that means more of the demand going into open, free, or independently produced games, and less into corporate developed games, and if that, in turn, means a genre is "dying", I'll go for the "dying" genre any day.
As the article itself notes some of these genres aren't dead, they're *free.* This is quite a different statement. I play asteroids and tetris on a regular basis, I simply didn't have to pay fifty bucks for them.
Saying these genres are dead is like saying computer solitaire is dead, even though it takes up more user gaming time than everything else put together, because it *comes with* virtually every graphical enviroment in the universe.
Or like saying the automobile is dead on the day that everyone on the planet is issued one that will last forever.
These genres aren't dead, they're bloody ubiquitous.
It's just that EA and Sierra can't soak us repeatedly for them anymore.
As for "virtual reality" being dead ( a concept inherently ridiculous in light of the sales of The Sims), in the manner they mean, it isn't dead. It's an idea ahead of the technology's ablility to deliver it and thus is merely in stasis until our hardware catches up with our imagination.
Trust me, when they figure out how make a pair glasses and gloves for a hundred bucks that'll give you your own virtual Sarah Michelle Gellar they won't be able to make 'em fast enough.
KFG
"I love the Sierra strategy games. It always seems that their games come out and within two months the price has dropped to $10-$20. GameSpy claims in this article "...but now their days as a game developer are pretty much over." Is it really that bad? Am I the only one left that loves their new titles? Empire Earth anyone?"
Empire Earth was Created by Stainless Steel Studios, http://www.stainlesssteelstudios.com/
My point was that Sierra primarily publishes other people's games now, like Half-Life. Most of Sierra's Adventure games were developed in-house.
"All of these genres seem like something that a young kid in the 80's grew up to."
Guilty.
"how was side scrolling platform games not on this list. haven't seen one of them in a long time."
I didn't include side-scrolling platformers because platformers are still around, they're just 3D.
Sure, this article isn't perfect and I probably should have included Pinball, but oh well, life's tough!
-Kevin Bowen
...only now they call the dots "powerups" and come in 32bit color...
Genres aren't dying, they're just becoming less well-defined. It's getting harder and harder to pigeonhole modern games into exactly one genre, because they aren't sticking to patterns (in basic design, at least). The only "genre" that has really died is text adventure, but that's only an implementation of RPG. Diablo is the same thing with graphics, and that's still going strong.
I don't think that saying the light gun category is failing. Light gun games remain to be one of the biggest sellers in arcade games (I say this because those are the games operators seem to keep around the longest). They say that no current console has an official light gun released. Why would they? It's the Light gun game developer that uses it and designed how it works with the system, ever notice that almost all PS2 light guns say "Guncon/Guncon 2 compatible", and all lightgun games are Guncon Compatible, I'd say theat the guncon is as close to an official lightgun as we'll get, there hasn't been a first party lightgun since the Sega Stunner for the Saturn. I can think of several recent light gun games that came out for the PS2 as well as several new ones in production now:
1) Time Crisis 2
2) Vampire Night
3) Point Blank Collection
4) Ninja Assault
5) Virtua Cop Elite
6) Police 24/7
7) Dino Stalker
8) Resident Evil Survivor 2
9) Resident Evil : Dead Aim
10) Time Crisis 3
11) Starsky & Hutch
I'm not saying that these are all stellar blockbusters, but that's more games that I can name in the puzzle category for Ps2, and puzzle game were judged less dead in the list.
Bork Bork Bork!!
Well, the "Beat 'Em Up" genre is different from the shooter genre. I think the big difference these days is that most games have too much of a plot to count as a straight brawling game. Many games have a large brawling element to them, but there's usually other things that make it into more of an adventure type of thing. Still, I do miss Final Fight.
I do think graphical adventure games are still around, albeit in a mutated form. They're just more complex, and they blended with other genres. The article mentioned how many RPGs and such have graphical adventure elements. I don't really think "graphical adventure" is a valid genre in itself anyway. I know they're talking specifically about the type of games Sierra made, but I don't think that's really deserving of its own genre on the same level as "puzzle" and "space shooter." But adventure games are thriving currently, so I guess they had to narrow it down.
And I really liked text games. I'm still mudding after all these years.
[insert witty quote here]
8) Light Gun
7) Text Adventure
5) Virtual Reality
3) Full Motion Video
All of these shouldn't be considered game genres, they're just a description of the technology involved. Any "genre" based on a technology is a fad, and that technology will eventually be replaced.
Text Adventures were "Text" Adventures because they didn't have the graphics horsepower around back then that they have now. If the creators of Zork started out today, they'd make a game with a simliar design with 3d graphics.
You could have a virtual reality shoot'em up, a virtual reality rpg, a virtual reality adventure game, and so on. Again, it's a description of the technology used to implement the game, it's not the genre. It was a fad.
Full Motion Video is the most obvious non-genre here. Again, based on a technological fad. We can put movies in a game, so why not turn the "game" into a movie? There were different kinds of games that had a lot of FMV in them, I wouldn't put them all in the same genre. Though they did all pretty much suck.
And as for puzzle games, if they don't cost $50 anymore, does that mean they're dead??? No! Puzzle games are probably the most alive and kicking genre there is today! They're everywhere, even your Grandma probably plays a couple of them!
I do agree with the article on one point at least: Oregon Trail for the Apple II most certainly did rock.
All those (with the exception of text adventure) are 2d games. Any new game is going to be 3d. All the consoles are optimized for 3d, PC graphics cards are made for 3d, and 3d games are a lot more popular. Nobody wants to make 2d games anymore. Those of us who still like to play Tetris and Galaga have to use MAME or play some freeware clone. There's no money left to be made in 2d games anymore. Of course, you do occasionally come across a new 2d game every once in a while. KDE has a whole lot of really good games, some clones of old games, some original.
#2: A couple years ago? Try like 1997, maybe '98.
I don't usually nit-pick, to be honest, but you just can't start off an article with such confusing laziness.
Plot: 8
Characters: 8
Execution: -4
I still hate them for installing into \SIERRA without giving you any options. I want the thing in my directory, dammit!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Fighting games are dying?
Excuse me???
What do you think all those FPS are?
Wolfenstein was just a game where go around killing things that then disspear. The only difference is you shoot them rather than walking up to them, but that's a technology thing. Side scrollers didn't let you see and fire very far, so moving around worked better. FPS allows you to see far, so it's easier to do that rather than fighting.
Fighter games didn't die, they just evolved into the wolfentein/doom/quake/unreal of today.
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As they pointed out, text based gaming isn't gone, and it's probably not going to go away. It's just not mainstream anymore.
And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does, except for maybe playing a game while reading a book (which is much harder to do). Also, what "technical capabilities" are you talking about? Hardly anything has changed since the infocom days; the same technology is used (albiet SLIGHTLY more advanced with the introduction of a few new engines - TADS, advent, etc). If you're talking about the addition of graphics, then you're not talking about a text adventure.
My imagination kicks the crap out of a graphics engine any day, and so I'll continue to prefer a good text adventure, and that's *exactly* what I've got. Incidently, I keep some of them here.
Still...it would be nice if there where more epic text adventures - ones that take a year or so to play. But that's probably way more than I can expect.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The "article" in question is pretty lightweight, but judging from the examples given (all Infocom titles), Kevin Bowen likely equates "text adventure" with "traditional interactive fiction" ca. 1984.
Sad to say, but by making the conceptual leap from "text adventure" to "text-based games" and then onto MUDs (MOOs, MUSHes, etc.), you seem to have put more thought into the subject than the GameSpy author himself. :p
Maybe they will predict that NetHack will die as well.
These games are just being published by smaller developers. The ones that can't afford the extraordinate fees to buy a chip so that there programs work on the consoles. These games are usually more affordable as well.
Check out some of these sites:
Game House
Pop Cap Games
Llamasoft
Shockwave Games
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I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that the Monkey Island series was just great because it was absolutly hilarious.
Also, the first monkey island game came with that crazy pirate face decoder, which anoyed the living daylights out of me because I constantly misplaced it and couldn't play (although it too added to the general hilarity of the game).
Finally, I wonder if anyone else has fond memories of prince of persia, because for the longest time that was the best game available to us poor mac users.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
... but remember the 2 things that make these games great in the day was that they were fun for the sake of fun and they ran on very little resources.
So while thay might be redundant on PC's they make great games for PDAs. Just look at Pop-Cap Games. Diamond Mind, Dynomite and many other great fun games.
And there are the PC classics that are still fun on a PDA, like Astroids, Space Invaders and tetris...
So i feel that theses games make great PDA games, letting you kill time quickly on that long daily commute.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I think they're dying as a popular form of entertainment, in the sense that people go out of their way to make them for profit (and fun?).
/. analogy would be the open source ideology. You don't make any money off it, but you do it for the good of making things better. If it were popular in the emic sense, everyone would be doing it to make money. (Which is what developers do =P )
It seems now that all the ones that are currently released are by die hard fans that do it for the sake of good stories - akin to a writer who writes for the sake of writing, rather then a writer who writes for the sake of making money.
A more
blah
If one game can keep a genre alive then Advance Wars proves that on the appropriate platform such games can be a killer apps. The fit is perfect -- it doesn't rely on fast reactions so if the ride is bumpy it doesn't affect the games. It can be saved mid game so if your stop turns up you don't lose progress. If you like this style of game and haven't tried it you are missing out.
I hear there's even a sequel on the way in time for Christmas.
Egg Mania (all systems) ...and on, and on. Those games were just the last few months! Puzzle games are published more often than any other type of game today. The problem is, "puzzle" is too broad a category to name as a genre.
Super Bubble Pop (all systems)
Bust-A-Move 3/3000 (GCN, PS2)
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (GBA) -- yes, it's coming out again!
The article shows a real lack of research. VR Games dead? Then how come Beachhead 2000 is the number-one non-redemption game in arcades today? No, I'm afraid there are too many inaccuracies to take the article seriously.
It seems GameSpy thinks that a genre is dead just because it isn't flooded with copycat crap anymore. I prefer that "dead" genres produce artworks like Ikaruga and Viruta Fighter 4 than the sewage drenching "alive" genres like RTS and FPS.
Hmmm... my guess is because there are no $$$ in muds, thus no reason to hype them in a trade publication!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I'd say that though gun games aren't dead, they're certainly dying. You mentioned Time Crisis 3 and World Combat. I'd probably add Police 911 to that (The one where it tracks your real movements). That makes a total of 3 games over the past few years, which isn't exactly booming.
Bust a Move and Puzzle Fighter, though still popular, are old. There aren't really that many new puzzle games coming through the pipeline. And classifying DDR as a puzzle game is iffy at best.
Same with the side-scrollers. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, AD&D, and Gauntlet are all old and not a lot of new games are being made of that genre, hence it's dying.
I think you're confusing good genres with dying genres. Even though a game may be really good, if no new games are being made for that genre, then it's dying.
Huh? What? 2D space shooter dead???
Let me introduce you to a few:
Ikaruga (dreamcast, import, coming soon to a gamecube near you). Done in glorious 3D, but on a 2D playing field.
Working Designs has brought over: RayStorm, RayCrisis, Thunderforce V, Silpheed
On the Sega Saturn, Radiant Silvergun still commands prices over $150 for an import never released here in the states.
Someone else has mentioned the 194x series, which is quite good as well. If you like side-scroller/platformer shooters, same poster mentioned Metal Slug, which is tons of fun.
Yes, the genre is not as numerous as it once was, but to say that it's DEAD is a misnomer. It's nowhere close to being dead.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I think light gun games are fading is because of the Columbine backlash. Too many groups were looking at light guns as the cause of all evil. I remember when I got my Dreamcast I wanted a light gun something awful for Silent Scope (never got it) but because of the recent isolated tragedies in Columbine no one wanted a kid playing with a gun for a while.
Which is unfortunate, because at least at most of the Dave & Busters I've been to recently most people play with the light gun type games the most. Mainly while waiting for the 8-way linked NASCAR games, but still, they're playin the light gun ones.
Even a firefighter type game.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Chess is not going to die any time soon, but it seems like if it were judged by the same criteria as the games in this list it would be percieved as one of the doomed.
I think there is just a perception that some genres are fading away because of how much marketing we see. Nobody wants to market and push puzzle games like tetris because they no longer are great money makers. That does not mean that their genre is dying. It is too hard to guarantee financial return for the simpler games. If someone puts a marketing push behind such a game and it becomes popular, it is too easy for a competitor to quickly develop a rip-off to steal some of that market share.
In essence, the problem with this article is that it misses the point of most modern game designs. Let's take some top selling games from the last year or two:
Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City
WarCraft III
NeverWinter Nights
Each of these games has a role-playing component (develop your individual war leaders' skills).
Each of these games has a puzzle-solving component (open the ancient seal by following clues).
Each of these games has a maze component (learn you way around Vice City).
Each of these games has a "dot-eating" component (pick up the gold, hidden item, etc.). Each of these games uses 3D graphics, canned video.
Each of these games has a "twitch" component (although in single-player mode, WC III and NWN allow you to pause to get your bearings or grab a snack).
In essence, all that the article shows is that the "one trick wonder" game is dead; you need to have more going for you than a single concept or a technology demo. Indeed, if you look at the graphic adventure -- it simply integrated the text adventure, the canned slide show, and a few mini-games.
There are a few minor things that have disappeared. E.g. being able to type text into a game has been replaced by selecting from canned responses? Why? Probably because most people find the process of figuring out that you have to SCRATCH your name into the rock and not WRITE, CARVE, or SCRAWL it to be too damn annoying.
Achaea and Avalon still make huge amounts of money. The problem with most MUDs isn't that they don't have a market to make money off of; it's that they don't have enough coders to produce a good product. Most MUDs these days run off of a stock codebase (SMAUG, diku, etc.) with a mostly-stock world. The MUDs with original content do well, but few of them have enough coders.
I, for one, still spend quite a bit of time (and some money, as I have a membership on) Cardea, and it's more entertaining than most other games I have at my disposal. The only reason the average MUD does poorly is that it is a low-quality product with little original content and no original gameplay.