Consoles and Competition

Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it.

Ben Thompson summarizes the history business models of the most prominent game console makers, as background for discussing Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard.

As someone who lived through most of this history but spent a lot of it too young to have the perspective to understand it, I found this look fascinating. The shifts in approach play out differently based on interactions with broader market trends in a way that reminds me a lot of competitive players adjusting to a shifting metagame.

See also Super Bunnyhop’s history of game industry buyouts.

The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers

The first 1,000 people to use this link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: https://skl.sh/superbunnyhop01228 00:00 70s02:17 80s05:18 90s08:28 2000'...

Super Bunnyhop contextualizes the recent large-scale game company buyouts by summarizing their history over the several decades the industry has existed and discussing the difference in how they are seen by insiders versus consumers.

Before Genshin Impact: A brief history of Chinese RPGs

If you were interested in learning about movies, music, poetry or any art form from China, you could easily find hundreds of books…

Providing another reminder that gaming is bigger and more diverse than many of us think, Felipe Pepe sets out to examine the history and influence of RPGs in various countries, pointing out that “[y]ou hear all the time about how big Fortnite is, with its 30 million daily users…. and then you find that a game from Vietnam has 100 million daily players.” In this first installment of the series, he examines China.

Mass market, mystery boxes and metric-driven design: The legacy of FarmVille

With the original FarmVille shutting down after 11 years, we explore the impact the hit social game had on the industry

As I wrote about myself a bit recently, FarmVille’s impending shutdown closes the book on an incredibly influential game (for better and worse) and a huge part of gaming history. This article takes a closer look at FarmVille’s legacy, discussing its role in bringing games to mass market and early steps in metric-driven design and what we might today call loot boxes.

Two histories of Myst – Picking Up the Pieces – Medium

The Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter raised $2.8 million from over 19,000 backers in May. Last month, the subsequent re-release of Myst…

A retrospective on the discourse around Myst as a case study on the weird and inaccurate ways we discuss and recall gaming culture. For me, the main takeaway is that gaming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.