Major 2020 hit Fall Guys uses a similar format on a zany assault course, rather than a shooting map.

Battle Royale is now a staple mode in shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, and a base format for hit games like Apex Legends. Inspired by the Battle Royale manga franchise and the success of The Hunger Games, the format emerged from the modding world, particularly the work of Brendan Greene in Arma 3 and DayZ, and finally the standalone PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in 2017.Įpic used the format to elevate Fortnite from also-ran survival co-op to global cultural touchstone. This subgenre of instadeath games in which large numbers of players try to kill each other in a rapidly diminishing map, has dominated the shooting world in the past few years. They are now universally used for games-as-a-service. Battle Pass pricing structures are often tiered so that low spending players continue to play for free, while high spenders are reaped for income, as they try to attain skins, emotes, dance moves and so on through gameplay challenges.īattle Passes were first introduced for MOBAs around 2013, but the search term exploded in 2018, when Epic launched the first battle pass for Fortnite. Taking the form of in-game 'seasons' that last a few months, they provide players of an extent game new content, challenges, and rewards. Inarguably, battle passes are the biggest monetization innovation of the past decade. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part 2 includes around 60 different accessibility features Battle Pass Accessibility allows more people to choose how they play games. The result is games with a far greater range of options than in years gone by. Game companies are hiring, and listening to advisers who understand the needs of people who live with a range of challenges, desires, and preferences. This is a seachange from previous years, when game design and marketing was often aimed at a very specific kind of person.Īccessibility - game design that accounts for physical, mental, and emotive differences - is taking off like never before. The most welcome change in games in the past decade is the belated recognition among game developers that we're all different, we all want different things, and everyone is just as important as one another. Taken as a whole, I hope this list paints a picture of the game industry's progress in the last decade, especially in the fields of social awareness, consumer power, monetization, creative expansiveness, and technology. I'm especially interested in words that have gained marked popularity in the field of game design and development. If enough words check out our criteria, we can look into including them in a follow-up article. If my experience with writing list articles is any guide, I'm sure to have missed a few good 'uns, so please leave suggestions in comments below. I have used brand names only when they signify broader trends. I do not claim that the words and phrases below didn't exist prior to 2012, only that they existed faintly in the world of video games, and are now used regularly. My rule of thumb was to include anything that showed a marked increase in the years since 2012. Gathering this list, I was struck by how many words, phrases, and concepts feel like they've been with us forever I whittled the list down to 30, keeping in mind readers of 's likely areas of interest (I rejected a bunch of colorful online gaming insults, for example). I checked maybe a hundred words and phrases against Google Trends (which goes back to 2004) and also checked regular Google using the time-window. But judging by Google Trends and other searches, all of them are either less than ten years old, or were used sparingly, if at all, in gaming circles prior to 2012. Gathering this list, I was struck by how many words, phrases, and concepts feel like they've been with us forever. Neologisms describe the way the world changes, or how we frame the changing world.

Gamer lingo try hard