When did the (first) golden age of PC gaming end?
When did the (first) golden age of PC gaming end?
Let's see if this community still is active.
I'm not sure if it's officially agreed upon, but I would say the release of Doom in '93 properly marked the beginning of a golden age of PC gaming. Modern homogenisation and monetisation hadn't set in yet and over the next decade or so the PC gaming landscape would be full of innovation and passion, with a sea of classics being released in that time frame... but when did it end? Was there a specific watershed game that signalled a shift in the landscape?
This topic has been on my mind for a while, because I've pondered on whether there is an open niche for a community dedicated to games of this era. They're not quite at home in Retro Gaming subs, but still old enough now that they might warrant their own corner separate from main gaming spaces.
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In my head? Half Life 2 was the beginning of the end for that era. Maybe not exactly at that point but it was a great game that brought even more people to steam than ever before. From there we now had a centralized marketplace for games with a massive audience and we start seeing the creeping corporate influence of "microtransactions", the death of the expansion and introduction of dlc story content, beloved franchises abandoning originality in the pursuit of mass market appeal. That kinda thing. Of course if not half life 2 then it would be the Elder Scrolls Oblivion, who truly started something horrible with their horse armor dlc.
The future is largely Indies or AA games, everything else is going the way of call of duty at this rate.
I think you're onto something and what I'm landing on as an endpoint is somewhere vaguely between 2006-09. We have several massively influential events in this period that shaped the following decade both in terms of design and monetisation.
I think both the Horse Armor in 06 and TF2 adding hats in 09 are good markers for the direction monetisation would take over the coming decades.
Design wise I think the release of the first Assassin's Creed in 07 - which set the precedent for the now-ubiquitous checklist-filled "UbiSoft style open world game" - is a fairly important marker. It's a bit of a watershed game, actually.
On a larger scale, the seventh gen consoles coming out in 06 also marked a shift I think. More and more PC games were being developed with multi-platform releases in mind. The identity of PC gaming became slightly more diluted.
These consoles also had internet access, which - together with the by then prevalent broadband internet - contributed to the death of the expansion pack.