PERMEN4D – In 2001, “Halo” on the Xbox, along with Microsoft’s groundbreaking online service “Xbox Live,” laid the foundation for the online gaming trend in the console market. This trend truly gained momentum with the release of the Xbox 360 in 2005 and the PlayStation 3 in 2006, which fully embraced online connectivity and took advantage of HD television’s widespread adoption to deliver high-resolution graphics. Meanwhile, Nintendo amazed the gaming industry with the launch of the Wii, which introduced innovative motion control technology and opened up gaming to entirely new audiences. Following Nintendo’s success, Sony and Microsoft introduced their own motion control systems, PlayStation Move and Kinect, respectively. This era saw the emergence of intuitive games that appealed to people of all ages and backgrounds, with genres ranging from puzzles and Sudoku to music, tennis, and boxing. Gaming evolved into a cross-generational experience for the whole family.
During the 2000s, powerful and multifunctional consoles started to take a significant share of the traditional gaming market from home computers. In contrast, the world of PC gaming was dominated by a new trend: Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). Thanks to powerful servers and widespread broadband internet, thousands of players could explore vast, fantastical worlds together. A standout example of this trend is Activision Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft,” released in 2004. The game quickly amassed a loyal player base, reaching a peak of over 12 million players worldwide by 2010.
Handheld gaming also became increasingly popular over the years. Pioneered by the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989, the handheld market flourished with the release of the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) in 2005. The next generation of handheld gaming was heralded in 2011 with the Nintendo 3DS, alongside the rise of smartphones and tablet PCs, which created an entirely new sub-market for mobile gaming.