What caused videogames to become so popular these days?

jews saw the market and the huge amount of money there was to be milked from it

>20 years ago, it was a niche hobby
no it wasn't you retard

It was

Whole generation of manchildren in their 30s AND marketing pushing gamedev for the normie crowd

damn spoony looks like that?

only nerds played games 20 years ago
these days every guy plays them and women play them to get attention from guys

They became incredibly profitable with the proliferation of affordable and powerful home computers.

It was pretty popular back in '99, but as you stated in the OP it just grew into a behemoth. Better internet made streaming possible, made competitive scenes visible and people having smartphones fresh out of the womb probably helped as well.

A massive marketing campaign 12 years ago by the big publishers + Microsoft.
The whole "gamer" culture was fabricated out of thin air by gaming journalists.

In 1999 videogames were so popular they were launching other fads
>33,000,000 N64s
>100,000,000 Playstations
>120,000,000 Gameboy Colors
A quarter billion is more than watch the Superbowl, MLB World Series, NHL Playoffs, and NBA Finals combined.

This. Video games make more money than Hollywood.

I'm not surprised, it's still a relatively new industry.

The market for vidya was always gradually expanding since inception, because that's how business works.

Its basically all marketing and nu-internet with social media. It was always somewhat popular but among young people. Nowadays you got the current generation plus the kids from the 90s that are older now. It encapsulates nerd culture as a whole. Women are becoming ethots instead of actresses, men want to make careers in nerd culture. Its what is selling right now. I do wonder if the kids growing up in this current climate will keep embracing this capitalist consumerism society that we live in or if they will push back on to other things.

Basically, social media was a mistake.

PS2, Fifa killing PES, call of duty 4 and mobile games.
The three riders of the video game apocalypse.

>arcades being extremely popular since ever
>pac man and space invaders became cultural symbols
>hundred millions of playstations, gameboys and SNES sold, a billion or more games sold for every platform
>"dude games were niche lmao xD"
fuck off, zoomer

I typed a 10 point reply and lost it so I'll just make it quick
1:lower barrier of entry. Consoles and pcs are much less expensive than they used to be
2: people who grew up on games and went into other markets and job fields normalizing gaming to society, especially media like film and tv
3: more peopple in the world = bigger market, more mindshare / word of mouth / marketing budget (from previous successful sales) = more market penetration. its been growing for decades for all companies
4: modern society and social aspects of defining oneself through what you do or buy, peer pressure, all my friends are playing Minecraft/dota/lol/CS/whatever it is so things explode easier
5: broadband internet allowed for multiplayer focus
6:gatcha and mobile shit didnt exist in the 90s and now it makes more money than anything because of gamblers
7:mobile gaming in general due to the increase of commuting by train or by someone else driving you (uber/left/whatever), more cellphone than Sony/nintendo handhelds
8:nostalgia, many people who were 8 when they first played ocarina of time are now in their quarter life crisis and will go buy the new Nintendo console and zelda game to recapture their youth, for example. This is an issue across many industries, hence why you see remakes of dunno and lion king, and why games like spyro and crash get remastered and battletoads getting a sequel/remake rather than studios making something new
9: colleges / uni kids have a lot of time and i mean a LOT of time to waste, so f2p have huge success in these markets. Instead of d&d or cosmic encounter they're playing warframe or something like it. mmo/multiplayer-loot-and-shoot is a perfect "Friday night game" for most target audience semi-casuals.

you'll note most "real" games don't gain audience they lose it, and markets are even more niche and small for certain more cerebral genres (AFPS other than butchered QC, RTS other than ruined SC2, a TBS anywhere near as good as JA2 or X-Com)

nah every kid had a fucking playstation or n64 in the late 90s.

I want a qt Asian gf cosplayer

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Underrated

>Industry goes big
>Create cancer such as streamers and lootboxes
>You’ve invested too much of your time in it
>When you could’ve found a girlfriend

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yeah, kid, not adults

That’s a shitskin

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Part of jewish sjw agenda.

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This. It pains me that most of your retards weren't even alive twenty years ago, much less playing vidya

>lifetime sales
retard alert

Accessibility: Price, genres and barrier to enter games
Marketing

well okay mostly "nerd" adults played video games, but that doesn't mean that games weren't popular.

holy fuck this bitch is so low effort

and phones OP, phones.

What?

a sea of weak cuckolds and bitter feminists, what a surprise each of them to a fault is a hideous twisted human

Portal and Bing Bang Theory. Not even joking.

Phones.

It's always been happening. You can pick and choose your own tipping point. I like to name 2007 as when it became totally iredeemable.

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someone who liked me tried to get me to dress up in sexy cosplay clothing and makeup and I flipped out on him saying "YOU DON'T LIKE ME HOW I AM NOW?"
I assume it's the same for a lot of girls, not necessarily jealousy over fictional characters, but more just the feeling like they're being accused of not looking good the way they are

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Video Games were booming in 1999 user. Or did you think pokemon was some underground thing that only nerds engaged in?

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yeah, it's not like they sold 75% of this while the gen still hadn't ended

>Put on a choker and a black swimsuit
>(Badly) photoshop everything else
>Can't even bother to put some shitty generic horns
This has to be the laziest cosplay I've seen in my life, heck even the cardboard Gundam looks clever in comparison

That’s retarded, people just have a cosplay fetish

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Bill Gates.

That's stupid and you're stupid. Do most women have this backwards logic or someshit?

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>20 years ago, it was a niche hobby but now it's all about gaming these days, it even surpassed the film and music industry.
No it wasn't, you're dumb. Everyone was playing video games 20 years ago. 30 years ago it was starting to get mainstream traction.

What you're talking about is all the 40+ year olds that didn't play video games 20 years ago. Now they're old and going to retirement homes where nobody has to listen to them again. Aging is what happened.

>1999
>gaming was a niche hobby
What the fuck am I reading

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You just have insecurity issues. Most of the girls I've been with told me they get turned on when I tell them what to wear, or even for costume play. You should probably work on yourself a bit more if your reaction to a guy telling you to put on a costume is to assume that they don't like you. They probably didn't like you considering that's how you act.

>20 years ago it was a niche hobby

20 years ago was 1999. This was the era of the original PS. It was more like 30 years ago when it was a niche hobby.

first off, i'm a biological male.
second, the guy I was with would ask for face and body pics a lot over the phone when we were'nt in a position to be intimate physically. And rather abruptly they ended up asking me to dress up and wear makeup and were rather pushy about it. It felt like he was hinting at something, or that he didn't like how I looked normally and that I needed to cover up the bad bits so to speak.

God I wish I were an attractive girl who could pull off cosplay

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eyeshield sucks but I loved it

Genesis did it first, too. There's a reason there were so many sports games on the Genny at launch.

>tattoo
Instant 2/10

accessibility

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Video games have been mainstream since the Atari/NES days. It just grew even more since then.

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2007 is way too late. Warcraft was already mainstream in 2004 and mmos had been a niche in the gaming industry as a whole.

Everyone under 40 grew up with 8bit games, everyone under 35 grew up with 16 and 32bit games.

Development in technology slowed rapidly in the 00s where it takes even more tech and even more dev time to make a tinier bit of advancement. It wouldn't have gotten there if it wasn't already a mainstream industry.

Population explosion and increased availability of cheap internet.

Wrong. If you were to compare the number of adults playing videogames today, to those of adults playing in the 90s, the 90s number would be dwarfed by today's.

>didn’t even bother to make real horns for her shit cosplay

Lazy whore.

>wrong
>but agrees with him about the it growing
?

He said videogames were mainstream back then, when they were not. The only reason they're mainstream now is because 90s kids are adults.

>biological male
Ah that explains all of your issues. No more needs to be said.

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>something is only mainstream when adults play it
And millions of adults were playing Atari/NES as well, you dolt. Just because sales increased over time doesn't mean the Atari/NES were not mainstream. That's like claiming movies like 1989 Batman weren't popular because later Batman movies did better.

>first off, I’m a biological male
Already off to a beautiful start here
>he would ask for face and body pics when we weren’t together physically
If he didn’t like your face and body, why would he ask for pictures of them?
>he would get pushy about it
Probably because it was a fetish for him and your insecure ass decided to sperg out about it.
Can’t believe gays say guys are less hassle when you have dumb fags like this.

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30 years ago they weren't exactly rare, in 1999 everyone had a psx or n64

Video games are socially accepted now, back then they were regarded as toys.

They were though

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god I wish that were me

>socially accepted
That has nothing to do with success. Porn isn't socially accepted but it's the most popular thing on the internet. Just admit you were wrong.

It wasn't. Just because only specific people played video-games, that doesn't mean video-games was a total obscure hobby. Everyone knew about video-games, thanks to the huge marketing, publicity, and vidya magazines being exposed to everyone.

Vidya declined because of companies exploring more and more ways to exploit profit, not because of more and more people acquiring the hobby.

>all the great bowsette fan art
>you use some 3dpd thot with the horns drawn on

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>Video games
>niche
Dude. 20 years ago? That was 1999. As a twelve-year-old in 1999 I can tell you first-hand; it was not "niche." You watched tv first and foremost, you followed-suit of your dad by loving football or basketball, and you played videogames.

And, go figure! Those kids grew up continuing to enjoy their hobby (mostly).

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i want zoomers to leave.
Pathetic excuse of nerd culture, you always think you are in for the start of things, that your culture is somehow the exception, that you are new fresh and important... get the fuck out retards. Its because retardation like this that games have gone to shit to begin with.

Go back to masturbate to undertale porn.
Fucking toddlers newfags havent even been turned into an eggplant in kid icarus.

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I love that people who always post this are most likely the third category

it's to illustrate the point you fucking retard, with gaming being so mainstream and normal that low effort cosplay thots exist

Stacy and Chad saw Marvin the nerd having fun so they shamelessly copied him

What do you think her coochie smells like

>What caused videogames to become so popular these days?
A huge percentage of people in their 30's currently grew up playing video games.

The shitty culture in 1st world counties created fragile people who are good at nothing, they have no self-love and thus tend to create their whole identity by attaching themselves to a group based on their race, gender or hobbies.
You can already tell how collectivist some of these retards are, talking about 'Gamers' this or 'Gamers' that, like they all were some kind of tribe, instead of individuals who happen to play games on their spare time.
That's why the loudest yell about accesibility, because it's about letting everyone pin this 'gamer' thing label on them.

Anyone who refers to himself as a gamer should unironically kill himself.

This has to be the lowest effort piece of shit I have ever seen

inb4 barneyfag

>life gets easy but tedious, no real problems to solve for average man
>games come out and represent everything a man needs and excels at: problem solving and competition
>people used to old times laugh at men for spending cash on games despite the fact that TV is even worse since you can't even control anything in it yourself, you're just passive recipient
>no fucks given
>over years game industry grows
>big money starts to appear
>games get better, people form communities around them and have fun
>big money lures in advertisement
>advertisement and fun lures normies
>greed takes over and money start to become more important than fun, DLCs, pre-releases, microtransactions are introduced
>to maximize profits devs are forced to go for lowest common denominator and make everything easy as fuck and casual so every shitter had a chance
>market caps but greedy advertisers with some lobbyists here and there try to squeeze more money by appealing to niggers and sjw, people who only care about attention and pathetic signaling which means they wouldn't be hooked up by the games for longer no matter what you do
>quality drops drastically and previously great series like Battlefield flop because it turns out that pandering to minority is against of interest of the majority

Surprisingly accurate. Except the first point. Life actually got more complex, but people are just hiding from it.

Why are you posting on Yea Forums? kys asap my dude.

So you're either a mentally ill tranny or literally an autistic faggot. Makes sense either way.

People who grew up playing video games are 20 years older now, you dolt.

>it even surpassed the film and music industry.
To be fair, those two progressively becoming trash helped a lot

>Life actually got more complex.
Complex, but not complicated. Though you may have personally developed issues in your life/job/neighborhood but the taxes of action on an individual to live has been easing as time goes on.

An adult in 1980 and an adult in 2010 are completely different in this regard.
Do you think they have to sit down and pay bills, or does a computer algorithm do that after checking a box?
Have they ever balanced a checkbook?
Do they have to go to the post office to buy stamps to send checks for their bills?
How often do they need to wait in line at the grocery store for 10 minutes while produce is weighed and compared to the index book, and then have change counted out?
Do they need to find someone or a phone book to look up a phone number to get a cab/plumber/pizza or just ask the ether?

Yes there's infrastructure behind all that, which is meticulous technology on a huge scale but the average person isn't a network engineer.

Complex != hard. Bureaucracy got complex but it's not hard but as I've said, tedious. You can go through it, especially that there are people hired especially for providing information in case you have questions because state now takes care for everyone, including literal retards.
What's so complex about life now? You go to school, then fucking university which turns out to be pretty boring, then to fucking job that was has high chance of being sterile due to all the bureaucracy, permits, licenses and other rules imposed to make sure everything is safe and works. You don't have to figure out how to get by in life because as long as you have a job you can buy your food, you even might save money for your own flat. As long as you go by instructions provided by the system you live boring but relatively successful life considering shitholes like africa and huge parts of asia exist.

This happened years ago, even back in the Atari days. Atari needed funding, and Warner Communications (pre-Time merger) fit the bill. Once they started smelling money that Atari was making, they replaced management with suits that knew nothing about video games and ultimately ended up killing the company, with Warner Communications breaking it into pieces just about five years after buying it.

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You're arguing that life got easier because there's more automation. But while that made some things easier, it made other things harder. Because of the things you named. People can't do basic things like balance their checkbook because they can't do basic math. But because people can't do basic math and don't have the attention span to do things, it makes other aspects of their life harder. Like the average person doesn't even keep track of basic nutrition, causing their bodies to get fucked up on sugar/processed foods and leading to tons of mental/physical issues down the road. This is life getting harder, despite the convenience.

There's tons of other examples like this. The biggest issue being social politics and social media making interaction between people 100x harder than it was 50 years ago. Which yes, makes life harder.

We'll edit it in post

Well, people who played videogames as kids grew up and taught their kids to enjoy videogames. Worked just like any other trend, like teaching your kids to enjoy sports or clubbing baby seals.