Points of divergence in gaming history- what is your "what if" scenario?

[Texan Penguin]

I always wonder about these things, you know? How one or two decisions could have completely reshaped the industry. What would you change? I'm not an expert, but it's fun to come up with this stuff sometimes.

1. Sega's hardware division is alive. The 32X and Sega CD are scrapped in the planning stages and the Saturn is given the additional time and resources needed for proper development- it is released in 1996 and has a relatively successful seven-year lifespan before being discontinued in early 2003. The Dreamcast launches in 2001 and is a massive success, with it's descendants launching in 2006, 2013 and 2020 respectively.

2, Nintendo doesn't alienate Sony, thus not breeding the Playstation. Instead, due to their collaboration, the N64 is a super console that is disc-based to compete with the Saturn in scenario 1.

3. Pokemon for handheld is scrapped and the franchise instead begins its life as a Gamecube console launch title and major system seller. It utilizes the Gamecube's broadband adapter and memory card slots for trading and battling instead of a link cable. Would Pokemon be as big of a cultural icon with such a massive shift in platform?

4. Microsoft goes all-in on PC, not creating the Xbox console. Instead we see them launch what is essentially Steam in 2002. Steam never happens. Console shooters never gain momentum like they did in the real world.

5. The "crash of 83" never happens. Atari is alive and kicking in the present. The NES still launches in mid-1986 but more closely resembles the Famicom- in fact, it IS called the Famicom. Nintendo is less afraid to experiment due to increased consumer confidence, leading to things like the Famicom's modem introducing an early form of the internet to households around the world. The Super Famicom launches in 1992 and has heavy internet capability, as do other consoles. Consider the cultural and technological impact that more consumers being able to use the internet would have. What would the earlier push for online innovation in consoles do to the industry?

6. Atari is still around as the third console developer.

7. Arcades never experience the decline they did in our timeline.

8. The PSP dominates the DS in the handheld market.

9. Mac becomes the dominant home computer for gaming.

10. Square goes bankrupt in the 80s.

[Aphrel]

With mmo's on the rise bethesda releases their elder scrolls online with the editor avilible to players. Letting players transfer their characters to an arcade mode where they can play player generated content.

Within months of the release all the elderscrolls games have been remade by players and put into the mmo game. And the world kept growing.
Within a year the arcade mode of ESO became larger than all other mmo games in the world combined.
Huge player communities started knitting their worlds together into a big elaborate puzzle of worlds, containing thousands of zones, bosses and dungeons. With dozens of worlds each with multiple continents.

ESO-arcade becomes the go-to sandbox mmo for players both to explore and play but also to build things for themselves.

[avitush]

Blizzard games have been a major thing for me most of my life, so I'm curious about how different a lot of things would've turned out in "what if" scenarios with Blizzard.

1. How would MMORPG's today look if WoW never came along? Say the idea of WoW is mentioned at some Blizzard Big Important Executives meeting in the early 2000's, but they shoot it down with "nah, that shit's not gonna make us any money, costs too much to maintain, etc" and that's it. WoW never grows beyond an idea that gets shot down. What MMO would be on top today? Or would there be a more even spread of MMORPG's without one clearly far ahead of the others? Or would MMORPG's in general just not really be considered worthwhile at all anymore?

2. Without WoW, what would Blizzard in general look like today? Hard to say what would've happened with the Warcraft series in that scenario. Would they have stuck with RTS and just eventually made a Warcraft 4, or would it have gone some other direction? Or maybe they would've kept Warcraft an RTS but tried breaking into the MMO market with something like a Diablo or Starcraft MMO. Keep in mind that Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo were already well established and popular (that included getting into eSports territory, at least for Starcraft) by the time WoW came along, so even without WoW, I imagine they would've retained that popularity. But then WoW has also made astronomical amounts of money over the last 15 years (including a decent amount that probably helped fund some of the other games), so how well they would've done without that is an interesting thought.

3. What if Blizzard North never shut down? That's interesting to think about. I've always wanted to play the Blizzard North version of D3 that was in development but got scrapped (there was an early one that they were working on, it got scrapped, and nothing of it got out other than a few screenshots and notes, and the D3 we have today was done much later by a different team). How many other awesome games could Blizzard North have pumped out in the last 15 years? The D3 that got scrapped was in development in the early 2000's, if I remember right, so it would've come out much earlier than D3 actually did. Would we be up to D4 or even D5 by now if that had happened? Would they have mostly just stuck with pumping out Diablo games, or would there be more original Blizzard North stuff? Assuming most of the key people from Blizzard North stuck around the whole time, that is.

edit: I also remember there was some original Blizzard North game in the works that got scrapped because of Blizzard North's shutdown. Described as "sort of like Diablo, but in space" and "a Blizzard North kind of game" if I remember right. Those were the only details we got, and that project was never spoken of again. Would've been interesting to see that as well.

[SavoirFaire]

Lack of WoW I think would be hella interesting, just from customer service expectations alone (before Wow it was garbage).

Other fun things:

-Nintendo folding (ha) as a card company and never getting into video games. What if the greats of Nintendo never worked together, where would things be now.

-Titan being released as intended which sounded like a looter shooter/mmo on drugs. What would it do to the current crop of looter shooters, and would it be like WoW in that it defines the genre and spawns countless copycats.

-some kind of world where acquisitions didn’t happen. Activism didn’t buy blizzard, EA didn’t buy and murder small studios. I guess a ban on big gaming conglomerates: would we be in better or worse shape for game quality and the like.

[Wangming]

10. Square goes bankrupt in the 80s.

Oh. This would have been brutal

[Puupi]

I wish Amiga was still here.

And Sega consoles.

[Blade Wolf]

What if EA and Activision never existed?

[qwerty123456]

The only what if I'd like to see would be what if lootboxes and season passes never existed.

[dope_danny]

2007/8 gets called 'the year of darkness' online because it was a big tipping point for games. The year the games media started pushing this unified 'Japanese games are bad and the west hates them' message which lead to so many games being taken back to the drawing board to be turned into shitty action shooters by developers who didnt make action shooters 'for wider western appeal' that nearly killed companies like capcom, EA transitioned from sports and shitty movie tie in games to buying up studios for original IP's, shit like The Big Bang theory started pushing 'im such a nerd xD' culture that would normalise stuff like microtransactions, companies started to cotton on to the whole 'theres a dark cabal of haters out to attack us!' twist on brand loyalty indoctrination, facebook exploded, the xbox 360 became very dominant in the west and bruteforced dlc and virtual currency/rmt's on consoles. It was a lot of major industry paradigm shits and very few were for the better from that period. To say nothing of games at that point being mindlessly easy compared to years before or since.

Just pick one or two of those things to change and the industry wouldn't be the same, but the 'west hates japanese games' deal is probably the most interesting one. If that never happened Inafune wouldn't have been wined and wined by microsoft and pushed the narrative that nearly ruined capcom, resident evil, killed ip's like lost planet, lead to mighty number 9 and a massive black mark for kickstarter that trickled down to other indie games, Square Wouldn't have done half the shit they did with final fantasy and Konami starting to outsource IP's like Silent Hill to the west while leaning more to stuff like Pachislot and mobile.

Or to be even more specific just imagine if Fromsoftware never released Demon's Souls. That game changed the idea of difficulty in games again. At that point games were obscenely easy and designed more like interactive movies in many cases with corridors of whitenoise between QTE's and overlong cutscenes. Then Demon's came out and by todays standards we are used to thanks to it its piss easy but at the time? people used to stuff like Bioshock where even on the hardest settings you have to turn off infinite respawns to make game overs exist at all? it was called 'NES hard' and it really reminded a significant amount of people that they enjoy games as a challenge rather than noise and lights to graze on as an escape. Nowadays most games with an action element have more difficulty than Demon's and thats great but without Demon's Souls i cannot imagine games would be better than they are now.

[Tech614]

Lack of WoW wouldn't change much. EQ and a few others proved MMO as a viable genre. FFXI came out before WoW, which means it still likely leads to XIV and it's eventual reboot. ESO would also still come out off the backs of skyrim popularity. You would definitely still have the Korean grind fest MMOs. You might not have the "WoW killers" but those are all either dead or dying anyways and nothing of real value is lost.

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Or to be even more specific just imagine if Fromsoftware never released Demon's Souls.

Well a more interesting hypothetical on this one is what if Atlus never localized and published it. It was a domestic flop in Japan and Sony wasn't going to localize it. Atlus is literally the reason Souls became a thing.

[Outofmana]

Activision and Infinity Ward not putting their full weight behind CoD1 was a defining moment for me and a lot of fps players, during the CPL times when CoD1 seemingly had a chance to surpass CS, with community radio casts with 1000s of listeners (yes streams with audio casting only), popular fragmovies and gotfrag.com having an actual alive CoD section. CS back then, and nowadays, for me having terrible movement and it simply not being a fun game for me to play it's quite sad that it's now the only serious shooter esports available. Loved the fast paced, but nade-heavy (which made it as tactical as CS's 'smoke' heavy strats, especially at the start when CoD1 was 6on6) gameplay, with intuitive moment and intuitive recoil control (keeping the gun where you aim for me infinately more intuitive and great to play than having cs's hidden recoil system where you end up on ppls feet). Heck playing Battalion recently made me hate being a static clunky moving mess in CS all over again.

When CoDTV was being created as a counterpart to CS, to live show the LANs, the modders needed activision support as some things were hardcoded not to work, they got declined and CoD1, at the time on almost equal footing with CS, declined and died. Again in CoD4, when the 'big 6' or whatever the term was, invested into CoD4 teams like SK gaming, and Evil Geniuses, and we had, for that time, a big prizepool international tournament, which was a big deal at the time, Activision declined to offer any support whatsoever, which caused said teams to leave the scene again and CoD on PC to finally die out, with people realising Activision would never allow a CoD game to live on longer than their sheduled 1-2 yearly release. At the end there finally was an anounced Activision CoD4 lan.....for console (lol), as a final insult. After that valve finally got their shit together, or the whole gaming world did as other games grew way bigger too, and we now have CS cemented as _the_ shooter game. Terrible imo.

There's a reason A LOT of CS's desk talent of today have a CoD1/2/4 background in either casting or playing back then, it just never got the chance to grow to CS's heights, as it was worked against by their creators every stop of the way, and wasn't around anymore for the big gaming boom of the last ~6 years.

I still feel Activision could tomorrow offer a serious contender to CS if they start a new CoD design with only having esports in mind, as a lot of people (basically the entire NL/UK scene, that grew up with CoD1/2/4, hence the lack of pros of that nationality) play CS:GO as it's the only option for a shooter, not because they love it. Anounce a giant tournament system, big prizepool, great ranking/reward system, good dedicated servers, publics worth playing (bringing back the community feel of playing SD/TDM publics in the CoD1 era), and a popular casterteam, and I feel there could be two distinct shootergames, if that nets them more money in the long run? I think with a proper skins system aking to CS's, it would, but it seems there's never ever been a drive there to dabble in esports. Battalion has just tried half-arsedly with a small game withouth monetary support and it brought back the entire dutch/uk scene of back then if even for a small moment before it died again, no doubt a big company can make it happen.

It would've been so much easier though had they just offered support for first CoD1, and later CoD4.

[Socialhealer]

What if EA and Activision never existed?

Other companies would do the same, a better question is, what if mobile gaming never existed therefore never caught on so insane loot box/pay to win features and whales paying thousands of $ for 10 minutes of dev time never happened.

[apples]

Other companies would do the same, a better question is, what if mobile gaming never existed therefore never caught on so insane loot box/pay to win features and whales paying thousands of $ for 10 minutes of dev time never happened.

gaming in general would be even more dead than it currently is. youd better hope that the real world finds some better way to monetize video games because this shit is on the downtrend hard

[Blueobelisk]

What if Konami didn't fire Kojima.

[Tech614]

What if Konami didn't fire Kojima.

They didn't. He fulfilled his contract and left. You don't get "fired" in Japan unless you get into serious legal trouble, you generally work at a company for as long as you want to.

But if the hypothetical is what if he didn't leave Konami, then he would of been the old guy with an office that helps oversee products and would have never been given funding for another large budget game. That's why he left.

[I Push Buttons]

I wish mobile gaming never took off and wonder what it would be like if that never happened.

Not even for the sake of the handheld console market, because I don't give a shit about that... Just that it has had such a pernicious effect on the entire video game industry.

[Socialhealer]

gaming in general would be even more dead than it currently is. youd better hope that the real world finds some better way to monetize video games because this shit is on the downtrend hard

gaming is dying? LOL

are you one of those who has been saying wow is dying for 10 years now? yeah ok we're all dying, so edgey.

[Onikaroshi]

gaming is dying? LOL

are you one of those who has been saying wow is dying for 10 years now? yeah ok we're all dying, so edgey.

Yea, I don't get HOW people can say this when a simple google search nets the fact that "video games now the largest home entertainment industry" and "why video games are growing"

[Super Kami Dende]

WoW never made.

MMO's remain very much a niche Market.

Every VideoGame company doesn't try and waste millions trying to make their own MMO.

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gaming in general would be even more dead than it currently is. youd better hope that the real world finds some better way to monetize video games because this shit is on the downtrend hard

>Reality and Videogame Economy literally the opposite to this.

[Fixxit the Gnome]

I wish that the godawful trashfire that was Gamergate never happened.

But on the other hand it unveiled the rampant bigotry that fills my favourite hobby. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯