Is Skyrim the reason gaming went mainstream?

[NTense]

I remember playing Oblivion and all my friends thought I was weird. Then suddenly it was cool to play Skyrim and even celebrities were doing it.
Then came all the problems we see today of unfinished games and microtransactions because casuals keep buying them.
I'm really concerned for Starfield and the future of gaming. I don't even want to go near Diablo 4 because they turned it into Fortnite.
Youth of today will never know the joy of going to the store and purchasing a game that was designed to be enjoyed and not milk their parents credit card dry.
What game do you think caused gaming to go mainstream? I also think peak COD got a lot of people into gaming. Do you think gaming going mainstream was bad for the industry or a double-edged sword?

[Syad]

Are you guy serious? Skyrim? It's a generational shift. The 80's (1985) gen grew up with nintendos. By ~2005 they were married with kids, who grew up watching their parents play videogames and adopted this behavior.

And it doesn't help that around the same time computers became essential.. to society basically.

[NTense]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Oubley:

skyrim was huge, but video gaming was big before that. skyrim was more like another notch on the belt in terms of video game history.

Yeah, good way of looking at it. I never said gaming was unpopular before Skyrim, I just think it may have gotten people into it who wouldn’t normally consider themselves gamers. Both good and bad for the industry because more gamers is good but now we have people making undesirable choices and transforming what shady executives thought possible.

[Oubley]

Początkowo opublikowane przez patrick68794:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Oubley:

golden eye 007? Wasn't that before Halo or even halo 2? That seemed a bit more popular then halo, though halo did take it to another level.

skyrim was huge, but video gaming was big before that. skyrim was more like another notch on the belt in terms of video game history.

Dragon age was pretty huge too and that was several years before skyrim, skyrim took things to another level.

Halo 2 broke the 24 hour revenue record for all entertainment products (this includes movies and music) at the time when it released. There were news outlets like NBC and CNN covering midnight releases for the game as well and celebrities attending the midnight release.

that doesn't make it mainstream, that makes it popular and a milestone gaming event.

you had news outlets covering arcades and events back in the 70's/80's that also doesn't make it mainstream per say.

you'd also have to factor in that was one of xbox's main catches which wasn't even the most popular system.

So of course it's going to sell a bunch of games, that's one of the reasons you bought an xbox.

Honestly when you had moms and grandma's playing tetris, and movies were made off of playing video games in the 80's/90's a good decade before halo 1, pretty sure can't say halo/halo 2 made gaming mainstream.

[Syad]

Something is mainstream when it breaks its designed bubble and becomes known elsewhere. For example 1 billion CoD players playing CoD is not mainstream, but parents knowing who Zelda or Harry Potter are, is.

I'm not actually convinced gaming is mainstream, it's just more accepted nowadays, cuz like said everyone played some sort of game by now.

[Oubley]

Początkowo opublikowane przez patrick68794:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Oubley:

that doesn't make it mainstream, that makes it popular and a milestone gaming event.

you had news outlets covering arcades and events back in the 70's/80's that also doesn't make it mainstream per say.

That makes it the single most popular entertainment product in the world in 2004. If you want to argue that doesn't make it mainstream then Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings weren't mainstream either.

Hell it took Return of the King more than five days at the box office to make what Halo 2 made in 24 hours.

I mean they weren't main stream so.... Star wars was popular and a phenominom, wouldn't call it main stream until 80's or even maybe the 90's original prequals, harry potter books was def not main stream early on. which lord of the rings we talking about, you do know there were lord of the rings movies before the lord of the rings movies lol

the 1st lord of the rings (not the anime from like 2 decades before) was def not mainstream. The 2nd one probably was (two towers).

Just like GAme of thrones wasn't main stream. The wheel of time was far more popular, and it took the tv shows several years to gain popularity. just for referencs.

same with harry potter, it took years to gain momentum. what wsa it the phonex order thing, book 5ish when it hit it's stride, maybe couple books before, 3 ish if you want to go that percy , wizard cup thing?

[Syad]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Oubley:

I mean they weren't main stream so.... Star wars was popular and a phenominom, wouldn't call it main stream until 80's or even maybe the 90's original prequals

Ye i remember getting weird looks from my relatives when i wanted to watch that Ewok movie. Star wars was a completely foreign name to them. Little did they know lal..

[Oubley]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Syad:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Oubley:

I mean they weren't main stream so.... Star wars was popular and a phenominom, wouldn't call it main stream until 80's or even maybe the 90's original prequals

Ye i remember getting weird looks from my relatives when i wanted to watch that Ewok movie. Star wars was a completely foreign name to them. Little did they know lal..

same, I did an 8th grade book read/review on the hobbit with a friend. (the lord of the rings books were fantasy wise popular and influential) but we'd get a lot of weird looks as had to talk about the book in class. that was just a handful of years before the lotr movie in like 2000 ish. And I remember going with a group to see the movie, which was awesome and fantastic, but half of them didn't even know what lotr was.

[NTense]

Star Wars, LotR and Harry Potter used to belong to the realm of nerds, geeks and fanboys. They didn’t become mainstream until the evil marketing geniuses worked their magic. Then popular kids and grownups got involved.

[Oubley]

Początkowo opublikowane przez NTense:

Star Wars, LotR and Harry Potter used to belong to the realm of nerds, geeks and fanboys. They didn’t become mainstream until the evil marketing geniuses worked their magic. Then popular kids and grownups got involved.

to tie it back to the original post, we could probably say skryim made elder scrolls main stream, possibly oblivion.

skyrim was the benefactor of years of grooming and had the full out media coverage. oblivion was just sort of here and there, still very popular commercially and within the industry received a lot of awards.

Skryim "mainstream" wise for elder scrolls was another beast entirely.

but i wouldn't say skyrim made "gaming" mainstream.

[NTense]

Skyrim was a mainstream game and advertised as such, it wasn’t advertised as an Elder Scrolls title but interestingly now that everyone knows what Elder Scrolls is, the next game is boldly being advertised as Elder Scrolls 6. So yes Skyrim made Elder Scrolls mainstream.

Is gaming as a whole even mainstream? What are your experiences when telling people about your hobby?

I should add, I have nothing to play atm that’s why I’m here contemplating video game history lol anyone got any recommendations. I can see now why people are so hyped for Diablo 4 bit of a dry spell

[Syad]

hey i dno, probably nothing, but this looks interesting, downloading the demo rn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L53-6MsFr8

[kdodds]

Początkowo opublikowane przez wesnef:

Początkowo opublikowane przez kdodds:

Lol @ all you younglings. Especially those 20 years late saying, "90s". Try early to mid 70s. The first ones to "hit it big" were the Pong types by Atari and Coleco. But the Magnavox Odyssey console was probably the first.

I suppose it all depends on how one is defining "mainstream".

Personally, I've been using computers & playing games since ~1979 (I might have played one or two things - like ancient arcade games, or modeming-in-to-a-mainframe Colossal Cave Adventure - before that). We had an Apple ]]+ then.
At the time, 'computer' stuff and games seemed like it was totally niche, the realm of nerds/geeks, people who hung out on BBS's or went to user group meetings - to me, that doesn't feel like "mainstream". To me, mainstream means not hobbyists/etc, but regular consumers - which is why I guessed that Some Popular Sports Game (something that would attract non-gamers) seems like an obvious "went mainstream" point.

(similarly, the Wii was another non-gamer entry point. My late-40's sister bought a Wii as her first & only console, to do Just Dance games for exercise. That's the only thing she ever used it for. That's the kind of thing that says "mainstream" to me, for a game console. But, obviously, gaming went mainstream much earlier than the Wii, that's just an example of a similar situation.)

Well if we're talking about "computers" proper, sure, way niche in the late 70s and early 80s. Most households didn't even have a computer pre-AOL/Win95. This is absolutely true. But it wasn't the 2600, either. Prior to that, a lot of folks were investing in the "Pong" video game units. People who didn't know what computers were, or how to hook them up, just connected a couple of wires and switched to channel 3 (in the US). I mean, that is pretty much the definition of mainstream, isn't it? Now if we're talking about popularization, that might be another thing entirely, and would probably involve the arcades of the early 80s and teenage socialization. ;)

[kdodds]

Początkowo opublikowane przez patrick68794:

Lol alright, I know not to take anything you say seriously. Thank you for making that easy to spot

It actually sounds like that poster lives out in the middle off nowhere with no access to... well... any modern popular media.

Taking the train in NYC at the time I can tell you that no matter what car you entered during rush hour, there was someone reading The Sorcerer's Stone around 1998/99, just a year or two after her initial, undramatic release. AND made the NYT's Bestseller list. You could not go anywhere in 1980 without seeing posters for The Empire Strikes Back. And let's not forget the huge influence ("Frodo Lives!") LotR had on such things as DnD, and later CRPGs. GoT as literature still isn't mainstream and never will be. Because it's terrible. The writing is horrid, the story is infantile, and so on. Whereas, Jordan's series is and will remain niche as literature. It will never be picked up popularly even as influenced by the Amazon series. It will remain favored amongst fantasy fans, they'll also tell you, the writing is pretty bad, but at least the story is good. Problem is, Jordan's less soap-opera minded than Martin, so not going to attract the "popular" crowd, like, ever.