You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons.
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
>The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.
Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...
Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.
I can't seriously regard Skyrim as RPG - it is simulation of RPG - visually pleasing, but no challenging enough. Too much loot in Bethesda games is really killing RPG vibe for me.
Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.
I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
I thought WC3 was 1990s but I went an checked: 2002. Weird. I so associate Warcraft (excluding WoW) with the 1990s.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias