The 2010s were an eventful decade for the video games industry, and things really changed drastically in many ways. From market tastes shifting to franchises going through ups and downs to major new IP emerging and taking everyone by storm and so much more, it’s fair to say that a lot went down in those 10 years. Given just how eventful the 2010s were distilling the entire period down to just fifteen notable things isn’t exactly easy, but that’s what we’re going to try and do here, as we talk about the 15 biggest trends of gaming in the previous, most recent decade. So without further ado, let’s get started.
OPEN WORLD CRAZE
Open world games have been around for a long, long time, but they really came into their own during the 2010s. It started with Skyrim, which took the industry by storm when it launched in November 2011, while at the same time, Ubisoft, too, were settling into their now notorious open world formula. And in the time since then, it seems open world design has completely taken over. From non-open world franchises going open world, to new IP avoiding linear design, to even many linear games inserting at least some open world elements, there has been plenty of open world design to go around since 2010.
