Video Game Trends In 2008

Gamasutra is running a feature looking at some of the most important trends that have cropped up or become popular over last year in the gaming industry. Gamers' outrage over the DRM controversy built up a great deal of steam over the past year, and will likely remain strong in 2009. This year also saw downloadable content being used for new and varied purposes, and many developers are banking more heavily on user-generated content, as in LittleBigPlanet. They point out the increase in retro and neo-retro gaming after the success of Mega Man 9 and anticipation for the new Bionic Commando. What trends do you expect to see more of in the next year?

Re:netcraft confirms it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about Left 4 Dead, which had 95% more preorders ( http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55618 [shacknews.com] ) than the Orange Box. Granted, it is not a PC exclusive. There were also quite a few good indie games this year, I think they may be gaining popularity: World of Goo, Audiosurf, Multiwinia and Braid are good examples of this within 2008.

Re:Trends 2009

[iainl]

I'm one of the people who moved to console partly due to DRM. Not due to any high-minded ideological reason, but simply because the locked-down nature of consoles mean that the DRM system is standardized and designed for. There's no super-duper untested new version that might have incompatibilities with something else, and even if it did the only job of my 360 is to play games.

On Windows, there's no guarantee that the latest Starforce variant isn't going to have a fight with the latest SecuROM variant over who gets to steal access to my DVD drive away from the functions I actually run a PC for.