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slowmo on 29 December 2010
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AussieGecko said:
slowmo said:

I believe the supposed "rise" in popularity of shooters is more a case of a lot of PC gamers have migrated onto consoles in the last 5 years.  That combined with consoles have gradually become a natural home for FPS games thanks to improved online capabilities and actual graphical abilities, not to mention the controller interface is better than it used to be.  FPS games have been popular since they were first created,it's only the more modern slant to people buying them on consoles that has changed.


No you are right shooters have always been popular but there have always been serious competition this generation there is none. Surely there is a tipping point and I think we may have hit it.

I think the difference is the huge number of quality FPS titles released in the last few years.  Looking back 10 years it was Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half Life that stood head and shoulders above the rest and most new FPs games just couldn't compete on the same level.  The number of new IP's that have created their own niche's within the FPS market has really expanded the FPS genre to the point we know consider what sort of FPS game they are (team orientated, twitch, tactical, competitive, etc). These new areas of gampleay have allowed new IP's to flood in and expand to the point a LAN event is no longer a deafault option that everyone plays the latest Unreal Tournament for the big prizes. 

It has of course happened in the driving genre which is another genre that has grown massively in the last 10 years.  Where you are quite right though is we've seen a collapse in the market for platformers, JRPG's are almost non-existant by comparison to last gen and these are the ones off the top of my head.

I think you're probably right that the market isn't flooded with FPS games as much as developers have stopped taking risks on other genres.  Games cost a lot to develop and it's getting harder to green light games outside the core genres that sell well this gen (music, WRPG, FPS, TPS, Adventure).  With developers creating less games it's perhaps skewing the figures on home consoles to look like there is more FPS games now than before when in reality the figure probably hasn't risen any in totals just in percentage terms.