Mass Effect 3's ending blows up | 10 Years Ago This Month
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Wednesday 9th March 2022
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past.
So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
"Are video games art?"
It's a terrible question. Of course they are.
They're good art, bad art, weird art, boring art, experimental art, offensive art, enlightening art, edifying art, disappointing art, and every other kind of art it is possible to be.
But like a lot of other art, they're also a product. And the needs of art are often different from the needs of a product. Art just has to exist, or to express something, to spark a thought, to elicit a reaction, perhaps to gesture vaguely at an emotion... Art has no real criteria it needs to fill.
But products have to sell. And as much as the games industry has grown in the past half century, it's always been far more comfortable with games as products than games as art. Between the deeply collaborative nature of AAA game development, growing team sizes, escalating budgets, advanced analytics and the importance of community management as a marketing tool, AAA developers are conditioned to treat their work as a product first and artistic expression second (if at all). As a result, when the slightest friction comes up between the artistic goals and commercial needs of a project, it often resolves itself to the benefit of the latter.
We saw a very clear example of that a decade ago, when BioWare
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