I'm not arguing that PC advancement slowed down, I'm saying that the a static set of hardware requirements coupled with large marketshare enticed publishers and development houses to stagnate.
I strongly agree with this bit.
Eventually gaming got popular outside of the nerd segment. This meant games had to be enjoyable for stupid people, hence the decline
Basically that's the whole story although it is a bit too much of a generalization imo. Of course, no complex process in history has just one factor contributing to its emergence. Also, I think many people who try to explain the process of "decline" are mistaking its symptoms for its causes.
Nothing I write is based on any research of course, but my argument is that nothing that's happening to the video/computer games market is a unique phenomenon. There is nothing unique about "the decline". If it seems that way to you, that's because you don't know your history.
I very much agree with Telengard's explanation but I think it's part of an even bigger picture. Since I'm not in the mood of writing essays, it boils down to a pattern that has been seen in other branches of the entertainment industry in the past -
a technology emerges that allows mass-access to a given type of entertainment, hence a widening of its audience, which in turn affects the (majority of) content that's produced, because the demand becomes different.
This has been the case with music, theatre, opera (in entertainment) since the at least 19th century when industrialization opened immense-sized markets for goods and services which until then had been accessible only to an elite, and that's even before the globalization of industrialization (which sort of stopped with China after 1979 and we're next expecting it in Africa at some point). Then in the early 20th century cinema appears - another enormous market opens.
And every time there is a group of "I was doing this before it was cool" consumers who are forecasting the end of the world now that the plebs have access to the same kind of entertainment, or other goods and services where such complaints would be applicable. It's funny how in the 19th century there were aristocrats annoyed at the fact that now every simple citizen could wear the same (or at least a very similar version of) suit or dress that used to be available only to the well off merely decades ago.
So there is the decline explained for you, at least as much as I can explain it. It's not that interesting for me. What's interesting are the reasons for the incline, and my guess is that they lie in exactly the same process I described, because the wider the market becomes as a whole, the larger the segment of the audience that enjoys your particular subgenre of this entertainment will become.
Simply put - the more "gay noob fags" we have today playing MMOs, the more (in absolute terms, not in percentage terms) audience for more serious games we'll have in ten years. I think it's exactly the widening of the market that allowed for things like digital delivery to appear (digital delivery didn't emerge to "deliver" us from the decline mind you, but to provide the mass audience with more convenient access to a mass product), which in turn made crowd-funding of niche games possible
because it made them economically viable.
Another interesting phenomenon in which the games industry seems to be mirroring perfectly the movie industry is the arms race of AAA titles which at some point stops being profitable for the participants in the arms race. I very strongly encourage you to take a look at this
interview given by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in June 2013 Or the boiled down version here:
George Lucas & Steven Spielberg: Studios Will Implode; VOD Is the Future .
It's the same process they are describing (AAA titles' budgets growing and investors becoming progressively risk-averse which leads to a drop in artistic quality of the products, as directors target the lowest common denominator in the audience) that we are calling "the decline" here, and the games industry seems to be slowly becoming aware of it - see "
Why Paradox boss wants "more Goat Simulator, less Call of Duty"".
What's interesting for me is that the service of Video-on-demand which Spielberg and Lucas propose as the future of their industry is vaguely similar to what crowd-funded games in our industry are, inasmuch as in this model of funding content it's the end-user, or the audience if you prefer, which votes directly on which project is good and which isn't. Again, I want to emphasize, it's the technology which allows the users to vote which causes the disruption, and that's the reason for the incline. Ironically, I see this technology to be born out of the success of the 'decline' - its success being the widening of the audience.
Another interesting question for me is - which are the main "supporting characters" of the decline - the factors which helped it. Many people so far have noted the technology advancement, the mass-access to PCs and consoles, the Internet becoming mainstream, becoming faster, but there are other factors, which I think are going unnoticed, and are connected to the so-called "first incline" - with computer games becoming an industry as a result of the first incline, we got science advancements in the field of games production. Some of you probably know this, but I'll remind you that Marc LeBlanc who is best known to me for programming Thief's AI (because that was about the time I began playing computer games) is one of the first people who wrote about gamification (I think even before the term was coined). With more and more money becoming involved in producing games, science became involved too - behaviour psychology being applied to game design contributed much to "decline" and I think its effect is under appreciated here. It wasn't just the kids with consoles, but the designers who gave them the addictive content. Anyway, that's another long subject.
It turned out a long essay anyway.
EDIT:
Consumers caused the decline.
Exactly. Blaming Xbox, Oblivion and anything else is nonsense. The only thing to blame is the fruition of Idiocracy and today's pampered generation. It isn't like games just declined, almost everything around us has from music and culture to movies and society in general. From dubstep and techno pop rap, Michaey Bayism and shaky cam. fascist political correctness and hipsters, to Twitter and internet culture itself. The decline has seeped in all around us steadily and it will lead us to a future of blue haired trannie armies and Equilibrium policies.
Thoughts like that mean only that you're getting old. The world isn't ending anytime soon, and consumers will always be consumers, and the average Joe will always have mediocre preferences and tastes, whether it's about books, movies, games, what have you. "I bet there were people in biblical times sayng "Kids these days..."" (sorry that's a quote from Mad Men). I don't know about biblical times, but people have been predicting the end of the world and the decline of culture and civilization since antiquity.
