Ten years gone

The size of the Google doc into which the Edge family threw ideas for this feature speaks volumes about the absurd clip at which the game industry moves. There has never been a truly quiet decade in videogames, but the past one was surely the busiest yet. It was one in which the traditional ruling class found themselves fighting not just each other for the spoils, but a host of new arrivals too. Traditional business models, development methods and marketing strategies were upended; players grew more invested, both emotionally and financially, in games than ever before. This was a tremendous decade for games, certainly. We’ll get into that later this issue. But it was also a fascinating, often terrifying, transformative ten years for the industry around them. Over the pages that follow, we run down what we consider the defining events, investments, rulings and fallouts of the 2010s.

ACCURATE PREDICTION

Back in 2011, the name Tencent carried little weight in the west. The Chinese investment firm was looking to bolster the games on offer in its instant-messaging-client-turned-game-store, QQ, and looked to the west for inspiration. It had acquired a 22 per cent stake in Riot Games, developer of , in 2008, before the game had even launched. In 2011, it raised its stake in the company to a little under 93 per cent for $230 million. Talk about the deal all you want has brought in some $20 billion in revenue globally to date.