4. Minecraft Introduces A Whole New Generation To Gaming
You want to know how big a deal Minecraft is? Microsoft just dropped a cool $2.5 billion on buying Mojang, the company behind the surprise hit PC title. That's how big a deal Minecraft is. The weird thing about the game is that nobody can quite figure out how it got so huge - the premise of an open-world LEGO box is deceptively simple - and yet, everybody wishes they could replicate its success. Like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum before it, Minecraft is showing a (mostly younger) audience the creativity that goes into making games, pulling back the shiny curtain of AAA titles and encouraging inventiveness, innovation and pure play. It also proved that an indie studio could have a substantial hit before they had the support of a huge computing company behind them. Speaking of which...
3. Steam Revolutionises How We Buy
A few years ago, the PC titles we owned were limited to a handful of discs of big games we couldn't play anywhere else (namely The Sims and Half-Life) (okay and Zoo Tycoon). Nowadays our PC collection consists of dozens of titles from big and smaller developers - some made by single-person teams - and exists solely as a bunch of files on our hard drive. Such is the revolution in how games are sold introduced by Valve, creators of hits like Portal and the aforementioned Half-Life series. Since the online storefront started picking up...well, steam in the last couple of years it's provided a viable place for indie games to get funded and distributed to an audience beyond the means of their budget, and a way for players to get big games cheaper even than a damaged copy from Gamestation.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
