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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I feel like there wasn’t really a single golden age for PC gaming, since each genre has had its own golden age. Doom, Duke Nukem, Unreal, and others probably comprised the first FPS Golden Age, but that was happening separately from other Golden Ages that were happening. You also had RTS games, Strategy games, and a bunch of other PC genres.
As far as when that first FPS golden age ended? I’d almost say that 1997’s Goldeneye 007 for the N64 marked the “end” of the PC FPS golden age, since that’s when console gaming got its first big exclusive FPS hit. EVERYBODY I knew was playing that game when it came out and you just couldn’t play it on the PC at that time, it marked a shift from PC to console gaming. Some genres would never make the jump successfully, like RTS games, but FPS games and Adventure games seemed to work well and that’s where all the cool new games went to. Obviously consoles had had hits before this, but that seemed like the first time they got something above and beyond just Mario or Sonic-style platformers.
Golden Horse Armor. That’s when it ended.
I thought about this too but disagree that this was the turning point. It was the first sign (I can recall) of what publishers wanted games to be, but the backlash they got was harsh. They postponed the full roll-out and came at the problem from a new direction.
I think the big turning point was Farmville and shit like it on Facebook, which led to mobile games full of microtransactional shit-storms just like it once smartphones became more common.
They used mobile gaming as a way to indoctrinate the masses that it’s okay to monetize the hell out of a game, and slowly migrated this idea to PC via free-to-play games at first. Then bit by bit they took small, methodical steps toward transforming the games industry into the micro transaction hell-scape we know today.
Farmville is an excellent major milestone as well. I completely agree with your take. It releasing in 09 again kind of reinforces my thinking that the 06-09 period is sort of a good endpoint for the era I’m thinking of.
Personally, I think the first golden age ended with the decline of the shareware model that was used by many of the classics in the nineties.
Sure, it wasn’t the decline of shareware that ended it, but de decline of the model went hand in hand with the rising cost of development and longer development timeframes that ended the games boom of the nineties.
That’s my take at least. Might just be an old man with rose tinted (shareware) glasses.
TES: Oblivion, FC3, Minecraft - all formed the landscape in one way or another in the days I was consumed by this medium. I don’t think I can draw a line here. It always seemed like a powerful stream of water where some deviations created their own whirpools in a race to reach this ideal product for sale.
i think to a degree implementations of services like Games for Windows Live stopped the first golden age for larger studio type games. ofc not all games were GFW but such a service that after its cancellation caused some games to just become unplayable on PC was wild.
What exactly makes now not the golden age? There are more games than ever and emulation tools, the Steam deck, big modding scenes, etc.
They did say "first Golden Age - no reason we can’t be in a new Golden Age.
But PC gaming has always been pretty great. It’s not like there was some “dark age”
You don’t have to have a dark age to hava a golden age.
Its pretty easy to find a dark age for pc gaming. There was a period of time, during the PS3/Xbox 360 era, where publishers were writing off PC as a platform. There were tons of console exclusives and the games that did hit PC were often bad console ports.
Still even in that period, there were PC games for people to play. If you were following game trends or interested in most of the games shown off at E3 those years then it was a dark age. If you were playing World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2, you probably didn’t notice.
That’s the bit I was trying to figure out.
I think there is too much bad happening at present day to call it a true golden age, but I might be wrong. Depends on your definition. There are certainly plenty of good games coming out. Maybe it’s a golden age of indie games? Overall though, predatory monetisation is rampant, pre-order scams and shovelware mobile games are abundant. Gacha games have conquered the world and continued the EA Sports tradition of selling gambling products to children. Shareholders dominate the business more than ever, we have mass layoffs happening everywhere, mods are getting copyright struck, we have normalised rootkit DRM and always-online singleplayer games… I could go on.
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.
When Gol D. Roger died
