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What decade was better for gaming, 2000s or 2010s?

What was better?

  • 2000s

    Votes: 232 88.2%

  • 2010s

    Votes: 31 11.8%
  • Total voters
    263
2010s was when the industry went full corporate (apart from indies and exceptions to the rule yadda yadda).

2000s was still the Wild West in some ways. Hard to beat that decade in terms of creativity and lasting impact.
 
2he 3DS/PS Vita combo not living up to the DS/PSP combo was sad.
Alan Wake said:
Imagine we had consoles like Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox and Gamecube simultaneously for some time.
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The Dreamcast was already gone by the time those launched (except for PS2).
 
00s were the absolute golden years for the medium and probably always will be. We won't get to see that type of advancement again. 10s were when we started flirting with the hypno-economic currency extraction model we all love so much now. Chock full of bright colored +15 weapon handling FOMO blaster packs and games designed to demand your attention on a daily basis. Developers are literally hiring the same behavioral scientists that work on slot machines in Vegas and gambling apps. Studying the effects of stuff like flashing light patterns mixed with audio cues and whatever other signals they can jam into your brain to pull money out of your wallet. That's just one small example of a very dark, very new corner of the development side of the industry.
 
2000s easily. Early 2010s were still good... then it took a turn for the worse mid way. At least if we're talking about AAA.

The 2000s AAA games were brimming with imagination, individuality, personality, originality and creativity. It was almost like actual creators and artists (read: not activists) were given carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they wanted and it worked most of the time. Now? not so much. I honestly think we're looking at the endgame of AAA unless the segment collectively wakes the fuck up and get their shit together.
 
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For a PC gamer like myself, 2000-2007 was the golden era. Crysis marked the very end of that era, and we only got crap ports after that due to rampant piracy making all the devs move to HD consoles instead. It took a long time to fix that, probably most of 2010's. Looking back, I guess Steam's largely to thank for that, and the console architectures converging around AMD hardware and Unreal/Unity. You could argue that this convergence has made all of gaming better overall, but you could also say it homogenized things and as the market has grown its gotten more stale in the AAA space too. Maybe that's more of a 2020's problem. There certainly was plenty of great games sprinkled around 2010's too. So it's very hard for me to say which decade was better overall personally.
 
Been gamin' since late 80's and nothing beats the 2000's in quantity and quality.

Gaming was getting even better in the early 2010's until the likes of Anatra Sarkastian started popping up and guilting the studios into firing their "toxic male" devs and hiring activists that possess only a fraction of talent and sought to lecture gamers instead of entertain.

Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of great games from the 2010's and even currently, but I found myself buying less and less of the modern audience games and going back to retro gaming. Especially with how far emulators have advanced, retro gaming has never been better.
 
The 2000s were when gaming changed into the entertainment juggernaut hobby it is today. So much amazing tech, new ideas, and rapid iteration on some of the most iconic franchises. Even putting aside my own nostalgia, it was an incredible time for the industry.
 
2000s by far

More experiments, games looking good month by month, and if you want to play a game, you just get a game and put on the thing to play

2010s establish the best quality ever in direction, but basically only safe games are launched and everything has bureaucracy to play
 
Grildon Tundy said:
2010s was when the industry went full corporate (apart from indies and exceptions to the rule yadda yadda).
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Reason why I felt teh 2010s wasn't as good

Grildon Tundy said:
2000s was still the Wild West in some ways. Hard to beat that decade in terms of creativity and lasting impact.
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Well that's because back in the 2000s companies were headed by gamers who made games for gamers. Not to mention, lot of these games had a lot of budget behind them. The first two God of War games were not only praised for their gameplay but graphics. Also the PS2 Era was when everyone was doing good when it comes to making games regardless of where your company originated from
 
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My cutoff point is 2013 when it started going downhill. Games started getting too expensive to take big risks with the PS4/XO generation.

1990-2010 brought countless franchises that would never be made today if they didn't already exist. No modern publisher would ever spend 100 million on a game about killing mecha-Hitler if Wolfenstein hadn't made it possible 35 years ago,
 
Wildebeest said:
#1 1991 - 2000 Peak of innovation enabled by new technology and actual genius level people working in the industry
#2 2011 - 2020 A good decade where people started to make good indie games and mastery of game design was taken to new level. Return of the Jedi era of gaming.
#3 1981 - 1990 The golden age when everything seemed new and exciting
#4 2001 - 2010 A shit tier decade of bland corporate domination and the creation of stale soulless IP and IP factories
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Not true, many great innovative games had their first entry then, those series just became soulless IPs the decade after. Halo, AC, Mass Effect, CoD, Battlefield. These are considered shit today because of their modern entries.
 
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Danny Dudekisser said:
The 2010s had some great games, but the 2000s was a constant influx of them.
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I feel this is the main difference.
The 2000s started off with a bang and gave us dozens of great games.
The 2010s had much fewer bangers, but among the big ones there were Dark Souls, Xenoblade, GTA V, RDR2, Skyrim, BOTW…

Quantity AND quality over top quality. I'd give the edge to the 2000s, but I understand choosing the 2010s.
 
It's tough to say because I really liked the first half of the 2000s and the second half of the 2010s about the same. 2000-04 and 2015-19 were some of my best years of gaming.

Those middle years (say, between RE4 and Bloodborne) had a lot of big disappointments for me. A lot of trend-chasing that I didn't care for. Not that there weren't some awesome games in there but I have mixed feelings overall on that "middle" decade.
 
I don't know. I play more games from 2010s than 2000s nowadays.

2010 - Mafia II, Xenoblade Chronicles, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing
2011 - Dark Souls, Dead Space 2, Rayman Origins, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
2012 - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Darksiders 2, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Yakuza 5
2013 - Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman Arkham Origins, Dead Rising 3, Lego City Undercover, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time
2014 - Infamous: Second Son, Ultra Street Fighter IV
2015 - Bloodborne, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, Yakuza Zero
2016 - Forza Horizon 3, Mafia III
2017 - The Evil Within 2, Diablo III: Rise of the Necromancer, Injustice 2
2018 - Forza Horizon 4, Judgment, Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st]
2019 - Control, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Days Gone, Dead or Alive 6

I still boot up Bully, Dead Rising, Diablo II, GTA VC-IV, Ninja Gaiden 1/2, Persona 4, Resident Evil 4, Soul Calibur 1-3, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1-3 with some frequency but I play more 90s games than 2000s ones overall. A few modern remasters of the decade get a lot of playtime from me as well.
 
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images
 
I think quite a few of what I consider the best games ever made, games that I still play today, came out from like 2014 - 2017 (FFXIV, Stardew Valley, Rocket League, Breath of the Wild, Into the Breach, Witcher 3, Persona 5, Dragon Quest XI). I'll be an outlier and vote for that. 2000 - 2009 was great at the time but most of the time when I go back to a game from that era, even one I really like, I find it fairly dated and clumsy (this happened against just recently trying to play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time again). A lot of stuff from the 2010's could easily release tomorrow and still be a classic.
 
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2000's easily wins for me. The Dreamcast era followed by World of Warcraft, and with gems like Diablo II, Baldurs Gate II, and Morrowind thrown in there? No contest, it was like the golden age of gaming for me.
 
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cireza said:
This was merely a response to console warrior post "Sony saved humanity". You don't have to get emotional over it.
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Ok but come on dude, saying it went downhill when the psx and ps2 have more than a dozen classics it has to be a joke or a extremely elitist take.
 
cortadew said:
Ok but come on dude, saying it went downhill when the psx and ps2 have more than a dozen classics it has to be a joke or a extremely elitist take.
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Both consoles have great games. They are all third party games though. It's not like Sony saved anything, these games would have existed anyway. This is a complete exaggeration, thus my answer which was an exaggeration as well.
 
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cireza said:
Both consoles have great games. They are all third party games though. It's not like Sony saved anything, these games would have existed anyway. This is a complete exaggeration, thus my answer which was an exaggeration as well.
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Probably but Sony helped to make these franchises visible and gave these developers a platform to release them. If we only had nintendo 64 it would have been waay harder considering the focus Nintendo had and the low capacity storage the n64 possessed
 
Another thing about the 2000s is that there was even quality with the games that were lesser budget. The games had a lot more heart put into them. I was still playing my PS2 in 2009 since I still had a lot of games to play through in my PS2 Backlog at the time. Even when the PS3 was out, the PS2 had a long life and it still had some great games at the end of it's life cycle

Nowadays it's the indies and only a few AA to AAA games that give that type of quality
 
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The lack of popularity in Spies vs Mercs
The popularity of CoD
Uncharted 2 being the first "10/10" game I saw as garbage.

How I survived the 2000s, I'll never know.

The 2010s reignited gaming.
 
cortadew said:
Probably but Sony helped to make these franchises visible and gave these developers a platform to release them. If we only had nintendo 64 it would have been waay harder considering the focus Nintendo had and the low capacity storage the n64 possessed
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The Saturn was also a thing and most games would have run just fine on it.
 
The 2000s are often seen as the best decade of videos games as the entire ps2 era was inside of it.

Then later on, who had the xbox 360, ps3 and wii. Dead Rising, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Metal Gear Solid 4. We could go on.
 
German Shocks said:
Saturn hardware was too complicated for most developers and it couldn't do transparencies properly.
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Irrelevant and inaccurate. Games would have been released on this console if Sony wasn't a thing. Do you think that third parties would have suddenly decided to stop their business ? Third parties have a business to run, they accommodate whatever the hardware is.
 
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Definitely early 2000s, the highlights for me are:

old school Blizzard games (Diablo 2, World of Warcraft)
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare
Company of Heroes 1
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil Code Veronica
Age of Empires II as it was on the cusp of the 2000s
Rome and Medieval II Total War
 
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nial said:
2he 3DS/PS Vita combo not living up to the DS/PSP combo was sad.

The Dreamcast was already gone by the time those launched (except for PS2).
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Nah, if you stretch it the Dreamcast actually had a few releases in 2002. It was dead in the market but still.
 
Probably around 1995-2000, we see the emergence of powerful home consoles capable of producing 3D games that opening up a whole new level of playing games, from openness of Mario 64, to classic horror like Resident Evil, or 3D fighters like Tekken.
 
Kids these days don't know what's been taken from them. The carefree naïveté and sometimes innocent nature of the industry has morphed into an amorphous blob of cynicism.

This is probably what older people probably think of when they look at younger generations. They have a point.

Whilst it wouldn't be overly hard for younger entrants to get access to those video games of yesterday, through various means of 'archiving', if they dig enough, it's understandable that they likely won't. There's no true impelling force.

What we were served in the 90s and 2000s were products of their time, part of the zeitgeist and the environment contributed greatly to the enjoyment of such, what alas, are, frivolities.


It is what it is. Look back with great fondness, but embrace your fate, there are still pearls here and there.
 
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