2012 saw the gaming industry undergo a remarkable transformation with crowdfunding, indie games and free-to-play games all coming to the fore. What other trends did we see in the past 12 months?
Rise of Kickstarter
2012 was the year that crowdfunding came of age, letting us, the consumer, decide what games we want to see made rather than relying on large publishers to decide for us. The successful funding of Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure (one of our most anticipated games of 2013) in February paved the way for countless other small developers to try out Kickstarter as a means of obtaining finance for their projects.
Niche genres in particular saw a Kickstarter-fuelled resurgence, amongst them, Project Eternity, Obsidian’s isometric RPG; FTL, a top-down roguelike strategy game; Godus, a return to the god-game for Peter Molyneux and recent record-breaker Star Citizen, a space trading and combat sim which raked in over $6.2 million of donations.
Next year will be crunch time for crowdfunding. There will undoubtedly be disappointments, where funded titles see long delays, don’t meet the lofty expectations that donators held, or don’t materialise at all.
So far, FTL is perhaps the only Kickstarter funded game to have released and achieved critical success, and it continues to feature high up in Steam’s sales charts several months after its release.
Kickstarter has given another boost to indie developers, so let’s hope that further high-profile success stories like FTL emerge over the next few months and continue to show that crowdfunding really is the future of the gaming industry.
Zombies, zombies, and more zombies.
The Walking Dead, DayZ, Deadlight, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Resident Evil 6 and ZombiU: it seemed like 2012 was the year that zombies sprang up and took over the gaming world. At this rate the next SimCity will have a zombie apocalypse amongst its usual array of disasters (actually, that would be awesome).
With the second season of The Walking Dead games on their way next year, in addition to a first-person shooter based on the TV series, plus huge titles such as The Last of Us, Dead Island: Riptide and promising open-world game State of Decay, the zombies are just going to keep coming.
Are you bored of zombies already? Well, hopefully not, because it seems like they’ve found a home on consoles and computers everywhere.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.