Quake 3 is 12 years old. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is 9 years old. Counter-Strike 1.6 is 8 years old. Counter-Strike: Source is 7 years old. Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 2 are 6 years old. Team Fortress 2 is five years old.
The foundation of esports owes a great deal of its existence to those seven games that I just listed. For quite a few of us, these were the first games that we got to play on our university Internet connections or maybe some of the games where we first started realizing that we could make friends over the Internet.
Today, they’re a reminder of a time when gaming seemed to be in its prime. With a certain fighting game franchise and a strategy game powerhouse excepted, the FPS genre was the meat and potatoes of Western esports. That’s not the case anymore.
DotA-clones and the sudden burst of popular technical fighting games just puts FPS on more of a back burner than ever. MLG Anaheim transpired this past weekend, but did you hear anything about the FPS games that were being played, there? Unless you actively follow those games, you didn’t. Halo: Reach has plenty of fans in the console world, as does Call of Duty: Black Ops, but they completely alienate the PC gamer by limiting its team pool. The only DotA-clones worth mentioning are now freemium and are actively developing advanced spectator modes that allow their games to be broadcasted live with relative ease to most casters. There are more fighting games than you can shake an arcade stick at with more looming not he horizon of this holiday season, it seems.
Is this the savior of FPS?
What do we have to look forward to in the FPS world? Battlefield 3 is probably the only FPS title that matters to a PC gamer that’s coming out anytime soon.
Outside the FPS genre: Diablo 3 is the next big Blizzard creation, but that won’t see the light of day until 2012. Valve’s upcoming DOTA2 is slated to be released before the end of the year, but it enters an over-saturated market as it is.
But the only FPS game I’m excited for is Battlefield 3.
Am I missing something, just incredibly slow (mentally) or are FPS games just on this slow decline?
FPS games are still popular to make, there was/will be BioShock, Mass Effect, Max Payne, Call of Duty, Rage, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, Bulletstorm, Killzone, Fallout, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Battlefield, Just Cause, Brink, Left 4 Dead and Borderlands to name a few. With every new game there is a small chance the developers will cater it towards the eSports crowd, we just have to convince them before they get too far in the development process and make it something else.