Red Faction: Guerrilla. Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. Deus Ex: Invisible War. Uplink: Hacker Elite. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. The Polynomial: Space of the Music. Section 8: Prejudice.
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Unreal Tournament Video Game Tracking is a weekly online survey of gamers 7 - 54 years of age. Qualifications include ownership of a console or PC, play video games at least 1 hour per week and have purchased at least one or more video games in the last 6 months. Additional data, including rankings of console video game titles and the electronic metering of PC game titles are in testing and will be available to select Nielsen GamePlay Metrics clients in the near future [as of ].
TF2 players must spend a whole hell of a lot longer playing than CS players for those average playing time figures to even make sense. The numbers the one guy posted are actually incorrect. Valve stated on their forums that the numbers are glitched on their website. I have a greatly difficult time believing Halo for the PC is that high up there Already have an account? In , Steam farted out that many games every two weeks with games released this year so far.
Steam was itty-bitty, even if it felt huge. The peak concurrent users on Dec 26 was 2,, Today, Steam often peaks around 16 million concurrent users. That's around seven times the peak. Steam was the big one, though Stardock Ashes of the Singularity, Galactic Civilizations had a go with their own launcher Impulse , which arrived in June A lack of feature parity with Steam and the sneaky insertion of Stardock's desktop organizer Fences into the Impulse installer didn't help it win over the masses.
GameStop bought out and rebranded the app in , shuttering it a few years later. The next launcher to arrive would be Uplay's primordial form in early I'll never forget the first time a launcher launched a launcher.
So, in there was roughly one major launcher. Compare that today's plus. Games for Windows Live made our lives miserable, though it wasn't exactly a launcher, more of an arbitrary overlay and DRM hybrid that forced you into the Xbox Live ecosystem. I'll never forget the day it was patched out of Dark Souls. Praise the sun, etc. Piracy was definitely a hotter topic in this period.
SecuROM was pushing online authentication checks and limiting how many times we could use a CD key to install a game, which sounds like a nightmare from here.
Spore required online authentication, initially limited to three total activations. Mass Effect was even worse : SecuROM required online activation every 10 days when it first launched on PC, though the three-activation limit wasn't a better solution.
I'll admit, as a poor college student, I was totally immersed in the world of ISOs and virtual disc drives, especially those lovely no-CD fixes to bypass disc checks.
Being a pirate was easy. The virus-ridden horrors of early P2P programs like Limewire and Kazaa were buried by popular torrent sites, where downloads were faster and content was cleaner or at least easier to verify as such.
But was also the year that the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent warehouses, were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and sentenced to prison. Around then you'd read the occasional horror story about some kid getting sued for millions of bucks because he downloaded an MP3. Do we prefer the old problems or the new problems?
The Sims 3 Electronic Arts 2. World of Warcraft Blizzard, Activision 7. Spore Maxis, Electronic Arts 9. With Steam as the earliest source of daily gaming stats we can get a look at what people were still playing near the end of , just keep in mind Steam's library and audiences weren't representative of the entire industry. Here's a peek at the top games on Steam on December 26, , as preserved by the Internet Archive. This snapshot certainly sends the message that multiplayer first-person shooters were still super popular.
Audiosurf, Torchlight, and Killing Floor stand out as prominent indies. Today's Steam charts don't look terribly different except for a massive growth in players across all games and genres, with some good diversity and new genres peppered in: car soccer, survival games, MOBAs, farming sims, and a bit of battle royale.
Most accolades went to big budget projects from established studios and series. This run of Metacritic's highest-rated PC games for would be the middle of the pack in recent years, with a few exceptions. The PC has always been the best place for indie games, but it wasn't until the last decade that we saw those games catch fire in a big way.
Steam and XBLA brought smaller developers to a bigger stage, giving cerebral side-scrollers like Braid a place to thrive. Today, the PC is flooded with games of a similar calibur. I doubt a Terraria or Stardew Valley would stand out in the indie game market of today, where excellent games like Wargroove and Lost Ember show up and seemingly disappear in the same week.
PC gaming was 'dying' in Widespread digital distribution felt like a distant dream for some, and rightfully so. High-speed internet access was spreading, sure, but most Americans were still without. The Pew Research Center points to the higher adoption rate of smartphones to a stagnation of growth in home high-speed internet services. Attention had shifted from PCs to consoles and the doe-eyed dreams of smartphone-driven lives. We were so naive. In the looming shadow of mobile technologies, expensive gaming PCs didn't quite fit.
Publications took pause to analyze the state of our strange, seemingly arcane hobby. There were tons of editorials like this one from IGN , which somewhat accurately points to microtransactions and subscription-based behemoths like WoW as the future. True on both accounts.
WoW is still chugging along with its traditional subscription model, but games like Destiny 2 are constantly changing the shape of their monetization model to see what works.
As long as we leave loot boxes behind, I'm happy. I'm a big fan of this dour brand of premature PC gaming funeral bell.
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