Top 10 Trends of the Decade

We've seen a great many changes over the last ten years.

We've seen a great many changes over the last ten years. The way we play games has changed, the way we buy games has changed, and, most important of all, games themselves have changed. The decade began with a bang: Microsoft's confident entry into the home console market gave us Halo. Then, in the blink of an eye, the Xbox 360 was upon us. As Sony's PS2 enjoyed an Indian summer, Nintendo rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the GameCube, blazing a trail for family-friendly gaming with its Nintendo DS and Wii - perhaps the two best marketed consoles of all time. Now, as the Noughties comes to an end, it's time to reflect. How, exactly, has gaming changed? What are the decade's defining trends? Here, in a special VideoGamer.com Top 10, we find out.

10. Mergers

Consolidation, consolidation, consolidation. As the stakes rose and game publishers struggled to satisfy their shareholders, mergers offered an attractive financial safety blanket. In Japan, a territory which has suffered a steady decline in sales and global gaming influence, Square Enix (2003), Sega Sammy (2004), Namco Bandai (2005), and Tecmo Koei (2009) were all founded. In the West, Mass Effect developer BioWare merged with now defunct Mercenaries developer Pandemic to form a kind of "super dev", which was itself bought by EA in 2007. But these mergers pale in comparison with the formation of Activision Blizzard in 2007. The eye-watering $18 billion deal brought together the Call of Duty publisher with Blizzard parent company Vivendi, and sent shockwaves tearing through the industry. No doubt in response, EA tried and failed to buy Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two. Now, as the global economy struggles with recession, losses are growing and revenues are falling. More mergers, you feel, won't be far away.

9. Open world gaming

At the end of 2001, DMA Design's notorious Grand Theft Auto franchise finally made the jump to 3D gaming. The impact of this event hit the industry like a brick through a shop window. GTA3's appropriately-named Liberty City was the perfect playground for deviant minds: you could steal any car you liked, you could start a riot by attacking pedestrians - you could even go kerb crawling for hookers, if you really wanted to. This free-form gameplay was unlike anything we'd ever seen before; we wanted more, and that's exactly what we got: from the dusty streets of Jerusalem (Assassin's Creed) to the radioactive wastes of post-apocalyptic Washington (Fallout 3), this new breed of game allowed us to explore and use our surroundings with near limitless freedom - resulting in many of the best releases of the decade. It wasn't all good though; who can forget the notoriously awful Driv3r?