Is the FPS killing gaming?

Absolutely they are, just like platformers destroyed gaming. We're doomed.

@GrantHeaslip said:

I don't really have anything insightful to say about the the issue [...]

That's okay. The OP didn't either.

I haven't even played an FPS besides random games of Counter Strike: GO! for so long I can't remember.

The bastardization of the first-person shooter genre is entirely absurd. It's blown way, way out of proportion, and I for one am getting tired of seeing these sky-is-falling threads week after week.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@BeachThunder said:

Given your previous track record in making threads; you either have no idea what you're talking about, or intentionally trolling. I think you're focusing on a select handful of games when you suggest that all FPSs are "the same". According to the wiki, this is a list of all FPSs from last year (feel free to correct me if I've missed any):

• Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm
• Bulletstorm
• Killzone 3
• Homefront
• Crysis 2
• Battlefield Play4Free
• Dino D-Day
• Conduit 2
• Brink
• Operation Flashpoint: Red River
• Duke Nukem Forever
• F.E.A.R. 3
• Call of Juarez: The Cartel
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Bodycount
• Xotic
• Hard Reset
• Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad
• Dead Island
• Rise of Nightmares
• Rage
• Payday: The Heist
• Blackwater
• Battlefield 3
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
• Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
• Serious Sam 3: BFE

That's 28 FPSs that were released last year. Also according to the wiki, there were 1187 games released last year. Your definition my vary, but 28 out of 1187 definitely doesn't fit my description of 'bursting at the seems'.

dead island is not really a shooter cus its pretty much mostly melee.

So 27 out of 1187 games released last year, then?

Fucking troll.

No.

If you don't want shooters, stop buying them! Evidentially gamers want to play shooters for the time being so there's nothing you can do except not participate in the shooter genre. I can tell you this though, Once the current demographic grows up a little bit the shooter market will decrease in size.. When i was a teenager I loved shooters. Now that I'm in my mid 20's I've almost completely grown out of them. Give the little shits time to learn and they'll lose interest too.

Yes I know there are plenty of adults who play FPS games but I'd wager my next 3 meals that mostly kids and teenagers are playing them.

sight...

I bought at least 10 games during the Steam Sale and not one of them was a FPS. There are more great games for any type of gaming preference than there ever has been.

If the majority of gamers want to play FPS don't you think they are going to make a lot of FPS?

@Orbitz89 said:

If you don't want shooters, stop buying them! Evidentially gamers want to play shooters for the time being so there's nothing you can do except not participate in the shooter genre. I can tell you this though, Once the current demographic grows up a little bit the shooter market will decrease in size.. When i was a teenager I loved shooters. Now that I'm in my mid 20's I've almost completely grown out of them. Give the little shits time to learn and they'll lose interest too.

Yes I know there are plenty of adults who play FPS games but I'd wager my next 3 meals that mostly kids and teenagers are playing them.

im in my 30's and i've yet to 'grow out' of them. i've never though of shooter being childish or immature.

@doobie: That's great, I've got no problem with you enjoying shooters. In fact I even said at the bottom of my post that I recognize that plenty of adults my age and older play and enjoy them. That doesn't change my mind that the majority of people who play shooters are younger people, Kids and teenagers specifically.

At least in my experience anyway.

@Slag said:

@boj4ngles said:

And my second observation is that I believe the current reign of Modern Military FPS is a product of 9/11 and the War on Terror (which I interpret to include Iraq), the two major events that have dominated America over the past ten years. I'm not sure I can explain it very well, but I feel deeply that franchises such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Splinter Cell, Delta Force, and others are all subconscious efforts by American culture to rationalize and simplify world dynamics which are complex, and which our political class have been unable to explain to the public....

I see were you are going with that but I don't fully agree. I think what you describe might be a contributing reason WWII or of late Modern Military was the theme for so many of those games but not why the genre itself got so popular. (and fwiw those concepts were popular before too)

FPSes were getting and were absolutely absolutely huge well before 9/11 happened and to me it was all about the communal gaming experience. There is no other genre I know of that's so easy to get a group of buds together to play an accessible, quick, high energy game. Only in the late 90's did the tech get good enough that the FPS genre became so vivid.

Goldeneye, Doom and Quake were the college party games of choice for a good reason in their day and that's because they were easy get going and fun to play.

Marathon was pretty big hit before 9/11, I think Halo and what followed would have happened anyway.

I know what you're saying. I don't think that 9/11 is responsible for the popularity of FPS, all I'm trying to say is that it is largely responsible for the current dominance of the Modern Military genre. So I guess I'm sort of taking the conversation in a different direction, but it seemed to me like the OP was implying that part of his gripe was with COD and its brethren. All the points you make are completely valid. Quake, Counterstrike and Goldeneye were paving the way for modern FPS gaming a few years before 9/11, and before that there were many experiments that didn't get too far because as you say, the tech was not so great.

I still want to contend though that in 2000 and before, FPS was never the dominant genre (interesting statistics about the shareware version of Doom aside). Platforming was king on the consoles, and PC was a jungle without any dominant genre. Furthermore, (and this is really the point I'm trying to make) the FPS genre was never dominated by so narrow a setting as Modern Military. Would Halo have happened without 9/11? Sure it would have. I'm pretty sure it was in development before 9/11 actually. However I still think my initial statements about the cultural function of Modern Military genre and its resulting popularity hold true.

@boj4ngles said:

I know what you're saying. I don't think that 9/11 is responsible for the popularity of FPS, all I'm trying to say is that it is largely responsible for the current dominance of the Modern Military genre. So I guess I'm sort of taking the conversation in a different direction, but it seemed to me like the OP was implying that part of his gripe was with COD and its brethren. All the points you make are completely valid. Quake, Counterstrike and Goldeneye were paving the way for modern FPS gaming a few years before 9/11, and before that there were many experiments that didn't get too far because as you say, the tech was not so great.

I still want to contend though that in 2000 and before, FPS was never the dominant genre (interesting statistics about the shareware version of Doom aside). Platforming was king on the consoles, and PC was a jungle without any dominant genre. Furthermore, (and this is really the point I'm trying to make) the FPS genre was never dominated by so narrow a setting as Modern Military. Would Halo have happened without 9/11? Sure it would have. I'm pretty sure it was in development before 9/11 actually. However I still think my initial statements about the cultural function of Modern Military genre and its resulting popularity hold true.

Yeah I hear ya, I agree that Modern Military is probably the theme of choice in large part to societal forces that you mention. Personally I think it would exist and be popular anyway, but you're probably right Scifi would be the FPS theme of choice if 9/11 didn't happen. That's where FPS games were going.

maybe what we're quibbling over is semantics.

But FPS not the dominant genre before 2000? You can make that argument I guess for Consoles, although Personally I felt like that wasn't the case.. To me it felt like Platformers fell off dramatically once consoles made the leap to 3d. Most of the dominant platformer IPs did not survive/handle the transition well. Of course game companies though they were going to be huge, since they had recently been really huge, so there was a lot of early Ps1/N64 attempts. And most kinda sucked. So to me they had already crested by 1995.

There was a brief awesome period from 1995-2000 or so where the genres felt really diverse and robust that has never really been recaptured. I'm not sure you could pick any one genre and it say it owned that period, but there were clearly trends in that period. Platformers were going down, Adventure went onto life support, Sidescrollers nearly vanished, JRPGs hit perhaps their highest point, Sports were getting near their peak, Survival Horror exploded onto the scene while Action Adventure and FPS were rising like a rocket.

In the late 90's it was really noticeable the way FPS totally took over PCs which had been really diverse in terms of genres and it clearly felt like it was coming. The buzz and excitement people had for that genre was unlike any off the others, the feeling that it was the future was really palpable. Just my two cents as someone who gamed through that period.

Either way I think we agree more than we disagree , fwiw.

Dude, FPS games were _the thing_ on PCs ever since their invention. CounterStrike wasn't just one of many, it was an institution.

And ironically, the other assertion (consoles were all platformers) is also patently false. The highest selling Playstation franchises were racing, role playing, third person action, survival horror and a platformer. The thing that swept them all aside; the FPS after Halo made it remotely possible, and Cod4 improved upon that.

How is the FPS genre killing gaming? It's made gaming as big as it is today.

I cant take your post seriously, you have the uglyst murder-clown face Ive ever seen, and are worried about alienating woman?

how the fuck is gaming dying when its never been bigger?

According to retail numbers, gaming is very much down compared to a couple of years ago. But the point still stands that gaming isn't dying but it is changing where "shooter fatigue" is just another aspect.

Maybe aspartame really is as dangerous as they say. With all the Coke Zero I've consumed maybe all that aspartame has warped my mind into thinking that perhaps video games aren't as bereft of creative merit as people seem to swear they are. Why does every wail of ennui have to take the form of "THE SKY IS FALLING!"?

Clearly on those with a heavy ape like brow enjoy the typical FPS game, it's all about pretentious over rated Indie games now!

well considering that video games make more money than music and movies combined. the reason people Like the fps genre so much is because we live in the first person perspective. It is the closest perspective games have to the perspective we live in our whole lives, its only natural people feel more natural in it. that doesn't necessarily mean other genre's are dying either. Game trends has ebbs and flows, it just seems like the fps genre is so dominant because it has been the most consistant genre in its popularity.

Hmm, music and movie sales have been down too due to related trends in the market. I am not sure doing better than those is something to celebrate.

@EXTomar said:

According to retail numbers, gaming is very much down compared to a couple of years ago. But the point still stands that gaming isn't dying but it is changing where "shooter fatigue" is just another aspect.

Video Games is one of the few industries that are deemed "recession-proof" (up until 2009).

However, video games as whole are still dominating the entertainment industry - or any industry for that matter.

Wonder how the automobile market is doing...

Hmm, I'd like to see numbers about how "dominating" video games are. A crutial point about this generation in video games is that the market shifted quite far which has caught all of the big players (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) off guard. A few years ago getting 1,000,000 units moved was just what AAA titles do where now getting to a couple of hundred of thousand is doing well.

Its not the entire genres fault. Its the generic CoD/Halo/Battlefield3&MOHletsbehonesttheirpracticallythesamegame FPS thats ruining it for the rest of us.

@banishedsoul1: game on game violence :(... when will it ever end?!

I don't think the genre itself is killing the industry - it's the lack of willingness to try new things from both the developers and customers - production companies are all about profits, and status quo usually keeps things running.

Taking a risk sometimes doesn't always pan out, but thankfully there are still some developers like Quantic Dream who are willing to see how far they can take the industry.

The Man Jesus says...

NO!

It's easy to get all worked up up about military shooters because of activisions success with them, but you only have to look at games like tf2 to see how a completely different take on the genre can still be massively successful. Tf2 also has a really big female following. It seems to attract a more mature audience as well despite its "cartoony" art style - probably due to its big competive scene, some of its more old school mechanics (rocket jumping right out of quake 3) and it's bigger focus on team effort and organisation. As long as we see this kind of sucessful variety and as long cave are still managing to squeeze out niche bullet hell shooters and pay the bills I don't think we need to panic about fps's.

Absolutely not. Sure military shooters have slowly become more stale since the rise of COD 4 but the fps as a genre still has hope.

Deus Ex:HE
The Darkness 2
Syndicate

All examples of first person shooters but with some creativity attached to it. I understand Deus Ex is pushing it but hey I think it counts

If I were to face palm any harder at the OP, my forehead would cave in from the pressure.

play some Dark Souls