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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Alternate History: What happens to gaming if the internet never existed?

Shadow1980 said:

PC gaming may be very different today without the internet. PC gaming went into decline after the turn of the century on up through most of the 00s,

Is this US revenue?

On a global scale, the decline of PC game revenue at the end of the century was minimal: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/peak-video-game-top-analyst-sees-industry-slumping-in-2019

  • 1985: $4.0 billion
  • 1990: $5.0 billion
  • 1995: $10.0 billion
  • 2000: $9.0 billion
  • 2005: $12.5 billion
  • 2010: $18.0 billion
  • 2015: $28.1 billion



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Al Gore doesn't get credited with creating it, preventing Clinton from winning the 1996 election, making Bob Dole President. Bob stays on until 2004, when George W Bush runs and wins because the country doesn't want to switch parties right after 9/11 when the war on terror had just begun. Instead, Bush takes over as the housing market bursts (in his 3rd of first term). Everyone blames Bush and votes for a President who will spend lots of taxpayer money to restart the economy and so Obama is elected in 2008. With the economy doing better, but the middle class doing worse in his questions to screw the rich to benefit the poor and neglect the middle class, he loses one or two rust belt states to a midwest Republican ticket of Mike Huckabee and Mike Pence. Those two stay on and get re-rlected in 2016 after beating democratic nominee Donald J. Trump.



Multiplayer is less of a priority in games than it is today. Local multiplayer will continue to exist, of course.
Games will be more complete when they release, due to the lack of patches, and DLC won't exist. Physical copies will be just about the only way to play games.
Basically a lot of gaming will be how it used to be, but continue to evolve with better graphics and sound, etc.



Lifetime Sales Predictions 

Switch: 151 million (was 73, then 96, then 113 million, then 125 million, then 144 million)

PS5: 115 million (was 105 million) Xbox Series S/X: 57 million (was 60 million, then 67 million)

PS4: 120 mil (was 100 then 130 million, then 122 million) Xbox One: 51 mil (was 50 then 55 mil)

3DS: 75.5 mil (was 73, then 77 million)

"Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind." - Guru Laghima

You covered all of the main points.  Here is my take on some of them.

The first thing that the internet impacted was gaming magazines.  You could now lookup a walkthrough online, and walkthroughs and hints were the biggest reason people bought gaming magazines.  Also the internet had a very immediate impact upon Adventure games as a genre, because online walkthroughs destroyed Adventure games.  This may have had a bigger impact than you might think.  In the 90's the games with the best stories were Adventure games (although RPGs were somewhat competitive on this.)  Before the internet, when a developer wanted to make a story oriented game, they would make an Adventure game.  It was kind of a way to be an interactive novel, but it very much relied on the puzzles taking some time in order to be solved.  After Adventure games died off as a genre, you start seeing narratives in almost every type of game.  I would argue that a heavy narrative works a lot better in an Adventure game than it does an action game, since when a person is playing an action game they just want to kick some ass and the story is kind of a distraction to that.  But, because Adventure games died off, we get narratives in most of our action games now.

I agree that the internet had no impact on American arcades, since they were killed mostly by consoles.  Specifically most developers decided to focus on console games, because it was much easier to make money on the NES and SNES than on an arcade machine.  The lack of developers lead to a lack of arcade games and it inevitably declined and died out.

On the PC side, there were a lot of changes going on in the 90's and early 21st century.  Some of these were impacted by the internet and some were not.  One thing impacting PC's were that a lot of action games that started on PC's were moving to consoles.  This sort of thing actually happened with EA first, when they moved most of their titles to the Genesis.  When Sony came around it happened more, with franchises like Tomb Raider and GTA moving from the PC to a console.  How much impact did this have on the PC?  In my opinion, not much.  Action games tend to be a better fit on a console.  When I look at the best selling PC games in the 90s they tend to be things like Myst, Civilization, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and several games made by Blizzard.  Add in The Sims from early 2000 and you see what kinds of games were popular on the PC: Adventure, Strategy, Simulation, and (to a lesser extent) RPG.  None of these are action games.  So I think the PC would have still been fine even with action games going to console, because the best selling PC games were not action games at the time.  Without the internet, the PC would have been the main place to go for Adventure, Strategy and Simulation games and to a lesser extent RPGs.

So, two PC genres that were affected hugely by the internet were MMOs and FPS games.  MMOs would simply never exist.  FPS, on the other hand, is probably the only type of action game that actually is important to the PC, and I think its safe to say that FPS multiplayer is the main draw for this type of game.  In the late 90's, laptops were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today.  I tend to think that as laptops became more popular, then LAN parties would have become more popular as well.  In the absence of the internet, this may have made PC gaming a solid home for FPS games.  After all, the PS2 had FPS games, but the FPS genre never really had serious sales numbers until generation 7 when online gaming came into play.  So, in the absence of the internet, I think LAN parties become the norm for FPS games and the genre tends to remain dominant on the PC.

All of this means that the PC would not undergo radical changes.  PC gaming would continue largely as it had before and it would continue to have a retail presence.  This is both good and bad.  For places like the US and the UK, PC gaming would continue as strong as it always had.  But one advantage Steam has had is that it has made PC gaming accessible to places where gaming doesn't have a strong retail presence.  I suspect there are a lot of places in the world like Russia, India, etc... that would not have much access to gaming if it had not been for Steam and online PC gaming.

Lastly, there are consoles.  I actually think digital distribution has had an even bigger impact on consoles than even online gaming.  First of all, there would be no smart phones without the internet.  Handheld systems have probably lost some sales to smartphones, so without the internet, the handheld market would be at least as strong as the home console market.  On top of that the "indie renaissance"would have happened on handheld devices, since that would be the medium where game development would have been the cheapest.  I also think that games would be less likely to ship early in the absence of the internet.  There would be a bigger effort to get it right before the game ships out the door once and for all.  I also think Gamestop and similar stores would be in much better shape without the internet.

Tying it all together, I tend to think today's gaming scene would resemble the 90's gaming scene a lot more without the internet.  Gaming magazines would still be ubiquitous.  PC gaming would still focus on non action genres like Adventure, Strategy and Simulation.  PC gaming would continue to have a retail presence and gaming stores would continue to be thriving.  In the absence of the internet, LAN gaming and handheld gaming would take the place of internet multiplayer and smartphone games respectively.  In general, gaming would continue much closer to the trajectory set during the 90's before the internet came in and changed the gaming landscape.



I think this discussion, on the internet, about what if there was no internet, wouldn't be happening, but that's beside the point.

How to legitimately reply to the topic of such a conundrum?



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No multiplayer focus, no DRM, no social features, no MMO’s, release of full and complete games, no updates and day one patches, no registrations, no accounts and subscriptions, no microtransactions, everything releases physically...

Mmm, I can only think of positive things if the internet didn’t exist.



I dread to think how bad gambling would be in games without a central hub to complain about it and push back against predatory monetization systems. P2W would be rampant because there are less incentives for people to buy cosmetics.

Though I wonder if society would've even existed or would still have a need for video games. I'd fully expect that by now without the internet we'd either be nuked or live in 1984.



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Ka-pi96 said:
Mar1217 said:
Nintendo would still dominate in the couch gaming department.

Not even close. The 2 best selling home consoles of all time are both Sony consoles, and neither of them gained any benefit from the internet either, so in a world with no internet, the PS1 & PS2 still would have dominated. There's no reason to think the PS4 wouldn't have dominated either.

I would have to agree.  Out of the big 3, the internet has helped Microsoft the most, which means the internet has hurt Sony.  Without the internet, Microsoft would have to have found another avenue into console gaming.



I would have heaps of PC jewel case games and almost all of them would be pirated I think.



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Deus Ex (2000) - a game that pushes the boundaries of what the video game medium is capable of to a degree unmatched to this very day.

No internet means certain crucial things would need to have been different in the late 80s and early 90s (perhaps a still ongoing cold war, or hackers become enough of a security concern very early on for governments to shut the whole thing entirely). Thus, we can't extrapolate almost nothing into the present because everything would have been changed as early as during the SNES / Genesis days.