2005-2009
The peak of AAA
& the casual revolution

The second half of the 00s saw the gaming industry almost entirely dominated by a few giant publishers like EA, Activision and Ubisoft, plus three console manufactures – Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

This oligopoly, coupled with the ever-high production costs, led to stagnation. To maximize profit, every third-party game had to come out on every possible platform, and avoiding risks was the rule of the day.

Successful games became “franchises”, to be followed by a schedule of yearly releases. Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty are often held as icons of this, but many series vanished after several repetitive releases, such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Tony Hawk, Need For Speed, etc. A few, like Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat, only being salvaged by recent reboots.

The arrival of the seventh console generation raised the development costs even further, and now marketing campaigns also required millions. Very few companies could keep up with such vosts, and these began to sell their games as “AAA” – a way to set themselves apart.
To better fit this console-dominated world, many traditions from PCs had to be adapted, leading to innovations such as Mass Effect's (2007) dialog wheel, Gears of War's (2006) slower paced cover-based shooting and the use of paid DLCs instead of packaged expansions.

However, people weren't interested only in cutting edge games that cost millions of dollars to create. With Steam starting to sell third-party titles, GOG, Direct2Drive and Green Man Gaming being founded and Microsoft creating the Live Arcade market, it started to became possible for indies & smaller developers to reach a large audience.

But it was a slow process. Self-published games such as Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich (2005) suffered heavily early on, as buying non-AAA games during the mid 2000s wasn't easy – few physical stores sold them and digital distribution was still seen as confusing and unsafe.

Finally, while the financial recession of 2007-2008 didn't affect games as much as other industries, the crisis in printed journalism did. Several established gaming magazines such as Computer Gaming World, PC Zone, Eletronic Gaming Monthly and Computer and Video Games all went out of business, unable to compete with freely available websites.

It was a time centered on massive AAA titles and casual crazes like Angry Birds and Farmville, designed to reach the largest audience possible. If you enjoyed them, you had a steady stream of popular hits. However, those interested in less popular genres and styles were left wanting, feeding off niche Eastern Europe titles, a few surviving mid-sized studios and rare indie titles like Cave Story and Nethergate: Resurrection.

Only at the very end of the decade things started to change.