Most Popular Contemporary Genre?

[FullAuto]

What do you think is the most popular genre of games at the moment? And why?

 

I'm not talking about sales figures, but what you think.

 

The ubiquitous first-person shooter? The hack and slash 'em up? The third-person shooter? The sandbox?

[Azrael Strife]

I believe FPS and Third Person Shooters (henceforth referred as TPS) are the most popular. I think it's because developers or just the publishers feel that it's easier to showcase super-mega-amazing-wow-retarded new graphics capabilities, no matter the actual gameplay. Plus, it's easier on the minds of the fanboys just aim and shoot, very little thinking involved.

[Bomb Bloke]

Not that I'm ever up-to-date on modern gaming, but it all seems to be first/third person stuff these days. A lot of these games that fancy themselves as RPGs, where your character evolves throughout the game (unlike the FPS's of yore, where maybe you found a bigger gun on occasion but that was it).

 

Can't remember "strategy" games being "really" popular since the days of StarCraft. Sure, a few have been, but the genre - overall - hasn't.

 

I suspect the reason why one genre would be more popular then another mostly boils down to "because that's what the "big" developers are making these days". For example, I doubt StarCraft II will manage to single-handedly make "RTS" as popular as it once was (even if it does somehow manage to fill the very large shoes you'd expect a StarCraft sequel to wear), not unless a few other development studios start churning out such games as well.

 

On the other hand, maybe it is those single, truly "great" games that cause developers to "follow suit", hence resulting in the popularity of the genre.

 

Yeah, that must be it. There was Doom, then a host of "Doom-'em-ups", then hey presto! Popular "genre", as opposed to just a popular "game". Likewise, Quake spawned a bunch of "Quake-killers", and we had a whole bunch of popular games that looked like Quake (basically, Doom with polygons). In more recent times we've got GTA, and a whole bunch of "GTA clones" trying to cash in on it's popularity. Boom, everyone ends up playing that genre.

[FullAuto]

Two that seem to be popular to me are hack 'n slash games (Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, Darksiders, Bayonetta, God of War, No More Heroes, etc) and open world games (GTA, Saints Row, The Saboteur, Prototype, Infamous, Crackdown, Spider-Man WoS, and so on).

 

They may not be the biggest sellers, but it seems like they're everywhere I look.