I think the two most significant trends in gaming in 2004 were the increased emphasis on in-game product placement and advertising, and Valve's sale, and, perhaps more significantly, authentication, of "Half-Life 2" over the Steam service. [Steam is Valve's broadband distribution system for delivering games via the Internet.]

The implications of the former are obvious, and as for the latter, I think there are probably some other developers in a similar strong position like Valve's, interested in how distributing a game via a service like Steam can increase their profit margins while also allowing an added degree of control over solutions to piracy and cheating as well as an enhanced ability to distribute patches and offer technical support.

-- Stephen "Blue" Heaslip

Stephen "Blue" Heaslip is editor in chief of Blue's News, one of the Internet's leading computer game news sites.

I'm very excited about the promise of Steam as a vehicle for online content delivery without having to saddle up the ponderous bulk of the retail behemoth for every little jaunt. As a reader and a writer, I love novels; but I also love short stories. Imagine if there were no magazines, no anthologies, and the only thing publishers were interested in printing were massive epics, blockbusters and trilogies. That's where the game industry is right now.

-- Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw was a writer-designer for "Half-Life" and "Half-Life 2," from Valve Software.

I found it interesting that the big titles of this year ("Doom 3," "Half-Life 2," "Halo 2," "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas") are all extensions of intellectual property originally created by independent developers in the game biz (that is, not from Hollywood or the corporate machine).

-- Alex Seropian

Alex Seropian says, "My technical title is Baron of Denmark, but I usually go by President of Wideload to avoid the hordes of adoring Danes." He is currently developing "Rebel Without a Pulse," a PC Xbox title starring Stubbs the Zombie -- hero, lover, eater of brains -- for a 2005 release.

I'm not sure there were any particularly big, defining trends this year, come to think of it. My bias is that I'm interested in new styles of play, and the problem with the world of gaming is that it's now entirely a hit-based, Hollywood-style industry; it's very hard for even the most well-intentioned game executive to greenlight a weird new form of play, because they have no guarantee it'll make back the multimillion-dollar cost of development. With economics like that, it's no wonder we're living in the land of the sequel.

Indeed, consider this year's most anticipated and hottest-selling games. They're all sequels: "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," "Halo 2," "Half-Life 2," "Doom 3," "The Sims 2," "Metal Gear Solid 3," the new "Metroid Prime," etc. Now, I'm not complaining about these games; they're all quite superb! And there's nothing inherently wrong with sequels; indeed, you could argue that games are becoming almost like TV shows -- intelligent serializations of a single premise. But still, I'd love to be surprised by some new gameplay, and nothing I saw this year offered any.

-- Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson writes about science and technology for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and New York Magazine, and is the video game columnist for Slate. He also publishes the blog Collision Detection, devoted to interesting trends in science and tech.

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