Face of modern gaming?

What do you believe is the face of gaming today?

Should be an interesting poll

if it was PC gaming, I would say RTS, but for gaming in general, FPS

I'd say FPS for everything (consoles included) FPS are hands down the face of gaming. For PC's - It's a tough tie between FPS / MMO's. MMO's attrach such a wide audience, while shooters generally attract the same crowd over and over. In the end... I think MMO's win (I no longer play them) with FPS as a close second.

I'd argue that MMOs, not shooters, are the face and future of gaming. First they attract a much more diverse audiance then shooters, while still being very popular amongst the traditional gamers that flock to shooters. Secondly MMOs are currently very popular despite a lack of availability across all platforms. As more MMOs appear on consoles they will become far more popular then any other genre. Also MMOs are problably the easiest of all online genres to implement cross-platform online play which means their communities will dwarf any game that is split up amongst differnt platforms. Thirdly MMOs are the most attractive games for the gaming industry to produce. They have long life cycles (WoW still growing strong since 2004) and present the largest return on investment with subscriptions and other fees.

I think your kind of confussing what makes the FPS genre. It's not the perspective (first person) as much as it is the gameplay - the fast action, reflex oriented twitch game. Thats why you can broadly lump in 3rd person shooters as well as old side scrollers into the same genre, but not something like Oblivion, which can be played entirely in the first person but is cleary not a FPS. In fact the first person view in Oblivion is often desirable because it requires less processing power the the 3rd person view in which more must be drawn. Other genres like, namely simulations and strategy games, could never really be done in the first person but still require as much if not more processing power then a FPS for various reason, usually AI. If you were to look to the future of gaming I would argue that AI will far surpase graphics as far as the main need for more processing power. Graphics will reach photo realism very quickly after which there will not be much more to acheive. AI however is just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be done and already requires a great deal of power. This is where multicore CPUs will be come more and more usefull in gaming, where as today anything above 2 is useless and many games dont even use that many.

True, however if MMOs were more readily available on consoles I think this would change. Say for example World Of Warcraft launched next month on XBox Live. MMOs would surpase shooters so fast that even Master Chief would be doing one of those "WoW - What's Your Game" commercials like Mr. T. and William Shatner.

I hadn't heard anything about Blizzard making a next-gen but it certainly wouldn't suprise me. As far as how it would effect WoW there is a couple of things you have to consider. First off Blizzard is one of the few game developers truely devoted to PC gaming and it has paid off huge for them. So it would be hard to envision them putting there PC products behind console. Secondly Blizzard is know for having a very long development cycle. I wouldn't be suprised if by next-gen they mean the NEXT generation of console (PS4?/XBOX720?). Such a time frame would fit in perfectly, or maybe slightly behind, that of a WoW successor and would very likely be a cross platform extension of whatever Blizzard's next MMO is. Just my guess.

Haha, I almost missed the /sarcasm and was about to post a big WTF.

Yeah, but its mostly in North America where this happens. (This meaning, being able to so easily shift the blame away from the person actually responsible. "Your honor, she only ran over her husband 37 times because she played lots of GTA and thought he would respawn"... give me a break... ) In China, some dude set another kid on fire and claimed that he was a fire mage from World Of Warcraft. The Chinese officials didn't buy it and locked him up for a few years with some big fine.

Don't believe me?

Source: http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/1 [...] en-bu.html

MMO's: 4 votes
Shooters: 8 votes

I was expecting some more WOW fanybois or other MMO players to see this thread.

Good to see shooters still strong after so many years though.