requiem
in which the author eulogizes the golden-age of western games
I’ve heard the impending release of Grand Theft Auto VI referred to as “the series finale of video games”, and while I think obviously the industry will continue to exist after November 19th, I do get the feeling that it really is the last hurrah for a particular kind of player — the white suburban 360-era “ball-n-gun” player, that has basically been on a diet of Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War, and Madden, since sometime around 2005. Even more so, it does seem like the end is nigh for a particular version of the game industry, as it existed between 2005/2020, a fifteen-year golden age of western video games, that somehow totally imploded upon itself during and in the aftermath of COVID19.
Somewhere between the pending atomic-impact of Grand Theft Auto, and the complete dilution and dissipation of some of the previously named franchises, there is a page being turned. These players are approaching their thirties, starting families, and assuming adult responsibilities — and these franchises are all showing their age too. There hasn’t been a culturally relevant Halo release since 2010, the newest Gears seems to have bombed spectacularly after costing a reported $500m, and Call of Duty is predicted to be down AGAIN this year, after having it’s worst year ever in 2025. Bioware is gone, Bethesda is struggling, and almost every big-name western AAA developer is facing major issues, if not owned directly by one of the platform holders. The players of these kinds of games are simply not showing up and standing on business the way they used to, and I think it has less to do with the games, than it does with where they might now be in life.
I remember so clearly where I was the first time I saw an Xbox 360 — it’s design was so fruitiger-aero, so non-microsoft, and it was sitting in a glass display case inside a GameStop, hooked up to a small HDTV and very loud, very good speakers. Someone was playing Call of Duty 2, and I couldn’t believe how awesome it looked and sounded. It was like nothing I had ever seen or heard, and it blew me away. A couple years later, once this console was ubiquitous, I remember going over to a friends house and they had multiple 360s set-up in LAN style, and were all playing Halo 3 together, online, signed in to their individual accounts, gaining achievements, all flawlessly over WiFi.
Online, the gaming discourse was often turned to small independent titles that were highlighted by the wonderful Summer of Arcade program, that brought games like Limbo, Braid, Geometry Wars, and Castle Crashers to the forefront. Games like Fez and Super Meat Boy were the subject of documentaries produced during this era, where it seemed like gaming was growing into something that dwarfed all other forms of entertainment.
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E3 presentations were becoming spectacle events, and game developers were becoming rockstars — Hideo Kojima was not a household name before 2015, but after the drama surrounding MGSV he became THE name recognized game director.
The indellible image of the teen or young adult white male, sipping Mountain Dew, and screaming obscenities into a headset was born of this era. This is just what 15-year old boys did in 2010…like teen girls going to the mall in the 1980s. This is a major cultural archetype that can be traced back to the legacy of one company, and their vision for a connected, radically different and broader gaming landscape that they totally delivered on. It would be not hyperbole to say that the Xbox 360 is one of these Top 3 or 5 most influential consoles ever made, in terms of what the industry looked like before and after it’s arrival.
So what happened? Ultimately, I think that the culture and zeitgeist surrounding the Xbox 360 courted a population of players that was very happy to be there in the moment, but were never going to be “lifelong gamers”, in the same way that Playstation or Nintendo players tend to be.
It sort of reminds me of the conundrum that Nintendo found itself in with the Wii, where they had a ton of hardware sales, but very little software to reap the profits on, due to the fact that most people were buying the Wii as a standalone machine that only played bowling and tennis — it was an appliance to them, that allowed them access to those few very important activities.
Similarly, although on a much longer timeline and trajectory, there were vast swaths of 360 players who bought a console just to play Halo, Gears, CoD, and Madden. That’s what that machine does — you come home, log on, shut the door, and play until bedtime with the boys in party-chat. It wasn’t about being part of a larger ecosystem or checking out other smaller games that might be on the platform, it wasn’t about a larger cultural or artistic interest in the medium of games…it was only ever about getting access to a particular social activity…in the same way somebody might buy a membership to a country club, or to an athletic club. I think it might have been an enormous flash in the pan, and something that ultimately wasn’t going to translate into long-time fans and purchasers over the course of many console generations. This may also explain the strange discrepancy in why the legacy Nintendo/Playstation franchises are doing better than ever, and why Xbox centric franchises have largely waned in cultural relevance over the years — they are simply being made for an audience who is disappearing. Resident Evil and God of War are bigger now than they’ve ever been, as with Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda. These are games that have only expanded their audience to a growing contigent of core gamers. The same cannot be said of Gears, Halo, or Call of Duty. These player bases are shrinking…because the casuals are tapping out.
Something else to consider — Does this decline have something to do with the advent of distractions like TikTok and other short-form videos? I don’t think it’s crazy to think that a more casually involved gaming audience might have lost some of their freetime to doom-scrolling on their phones, and the timelines sync up fairly well, regarding the decline of western gaming and the rise of short-form algorithmically generated content. I somehow think that the most hardcore players will find ways to keep their phone in the other room and dedicate themself to something, and the casuals might not care as much.
This may just be my anecdotal experience, but I see so much online rose-tinted nostalgia-posting about this golden age. They just want CoD to go back to doing X, or World of Warcraft to go back to doing Y, instead of Z…and suddenly it’ll all be like it was in the old days. The harder reality is that those times are never coming back, and the consumer market told the gaming industry that it’s not really what you want in your heart of hearts — Do you want the 360 era back, or do you just want to not have a mortgage and a career to worry about? The disappointing commercial performance of Halo CE and Gears E-Day (two games custom designed to appeal to this demographic), ultimately suggest that it is not these games that this audience misses, but clearly the times that subsumed and surrounded them. Never again will it be winter break, and your mom brings you a lunch-tray.
