Following Yahtzee's logic from his Zack & Wiki review, the reason why adventure games are a death genre now is because they became such a big seller that they overwhelm the game consumer as a genre and felt under their own weight. We can deduce that the same is happening with FPS, for every good FPS we get 20 crappy ones.So what genre os going to be the hallmark of the gaming industry next cycle? I am putting my money on open world games as next dominant genre, you know "like GTA but...."

I have to agree with you. Either that or western developed RPGs.

Horror might be creeping back up, JRPGS are finally making a decent break for the 360, but with games like portal i think we will see an increase in puzzle based genres

I think it's too early to tell what the next dominant genre is, since we're still in the middle of the domination of FPS's. Plus, unlike adventure games, FPS's also have the multiplayer factor, which could keep it going much longer.

although i hate them, MMORPG's are getting more and more popular. i really hope that stops.

well....it went platformer...adventure....JRPGs....FPS....and now it's freeroaming and MMO and "casual" games. The next big trend is likly something we never expected.

personally.....I just want quality again on a generally consistant basis. Once something becomes mainstream everyone copies and rushes things. Let's get a little bit away from mainstream. Just have a FEW good games a year of each genre instead of a hundred mediocre ones.

Natural Hazard:
Horror might be creeping back up, JRPGS are finally making a decent break for the 360, but with games like portal i think we will see an increase in puzzle based genres

I think you could be right. Horror or Horro/Sci-Fi. Seems like games like RE5, Dead Space, the New Aliens game are all in the limelight presently. Plus Condemned 2, that new Horror MMO (forget the name), etc. etc.

I don't think it'll be adventure, though I'd sure like a new Monkey Island, or a new Maniac Mansion game.

FPS had it's day. RPGs perhaps could be making a run?

If RPGs make a return....please let's go back to the 16 bit days where every one had a UNIQUE plot.

I think that the next big genre to topple is MMO's. You can already see it happpening. WoW has over 2/3d of the market share I believe, and the rest is scrambling for crumbs. I heard that they already pulled the plug out of Tabula Rasa...

I think the genre after that will be the strategy games. I believe Endwar and all upcomming strategy's this year will spark a new interest, followed by market saturation then a new downfall.

I would love to see space games come back. Particularly Open world one like Elite with real land able planets and maybe first person space stations walks/shoot outs!

purifiedinfire:
although i hate them, MMORPG's are getting more and more popular. i really hope that stops.

I think MMO's can become a great success as long as they're just not the same. Thats what seems to be happening now, all the developers are coming to terms that if WoW is so successful, why not make their own version? The problem lies within the "RPG" portion of MMORPG's. Why not try something new? MMOFPS's to me seem like a very profitable idea. An MMOFPS has already been done and despite its mediocrity it might have paved the way for what may come in the future (Huxley looks like shit, don't mention that one).

In short, MMO's need to stop copying WoW and try creating something new. Else we will see the fall of the MMO age very soon.

I'm loathe to identify with genres any more. The boundaries are starting to become vague. So I deal with concepts personally.

Sandbox has been the dominant 'genre' for a while now since the success of GTA3. It's one of those major features, and looking at my new 360, three maybe four of the five games I have for it could be defined as having major sandbox elements (Crackdown, Assassins Creed, Burnout Paradise and Mass Effect is the one on the maybe).

Personalisation and Customisation are simmering as must-have features now, but I think soon someone will hitch the idea about actually combining Open World with Open Character and capitalise in a big way. Especially if Chris Crawford's Storytron sells and someone bastardises it to work in a game world.

Procedural Content is the major next thing if Spore takes off. But hey, what's procedural other than the computer doing some work in reaction to what you're doing? Now if someone mixed all three of those together, they'd have a winner. A feasible one too if they didn't think too much about voice acting or having to construct dialogue other than in pictogram form.

MMO's, FPS's and GTA clones are all the rage at the moment.

Thanks to Gears of War and Uncharted the Third Person Shooter is making a comeback and we shall see what becomes of that in the near future.

MMO's seem to be waning a bit as the failure of Dungeons and Dragons Online points out the difficulties of competing with WOW.

Traditional RPG's of the Japanese variety are on the wane whereas I suspect we'll see some Mass Effect immitators in the future but whether this is a major stride in the Non-Japanese RPG Genre still waits to be seen.

Starcraft II and the recent successes of C&C 3 and Supreme Commander may point to a rise in RTS development.

I think FPS is really headed for a slow-down. It seems to me that FPS is the easiest of the console game types to move to online multiplayer, which is the big sexy business model right now. But it will saturate, not so much because everyone will be sick of FPS, but because enough of the market will be playing online that the economic incentive to throw something, anything! onto Xbox live will be gone. I think MMORPGs will do the same but less slowly, because most of them simply more recent and the genre hasn't been driven so far into the ground that it's gone through the center of the earth and reappeared in China. Yet.

major stride with Mass Effect....I doubt it. It takes probably 30 times as much time to make that game with every single possible outcome you could choose. It would be nearly impossible to have hundreds of clones of something like that (which is a good thing if you think about it) so it won't become a huge rave. That and....let's face it....who in USA buys RPGs mostly? The cosplayers. And I don't see anyone cosplaying as anything american.....outside of Ash from Evil Dead.

VRaptorX:
And I don't see anyone cosplaying as anything american.....outside of Ash from Evil Dead.

I dunno. Large white hoodie, some white cloth to extrend it, a load of latex knives and a latex sabre, oh and something to hold the wristblade...

Altair would make an awesome person to cosplay. Get some of your mates to bring in some cheap looking armour with red crosses on it and you can assassinate one of them in the middle of the crowd, and have a sword fight in the parking lot. It'd be fun.

((Edit: Okay, yes, Assassins Creed is a Canadian game from a French publisher. I was assuming American as a synonym for Western))

The Wii has brought a ton of mini-game collections and "casual" games, although I also agree about FPS's - look at how quickly Rainbow Six Vegas 2 came out after the first one.

though its more of a sub genre of the already huge FPS , I would love to see the tactical FPS shine for a while... you know... a decent one, like "Ghost Recon: Desert Storm," where the tactics are more than just take cover and waste bullets.

hopefully real-time rpgs. Rogue galaxy, FF12(which I sold before playing(ebay ps2 bundle) due to a lack of time) .hack gu(and to a lesser extent the old .hack), and tales are all great. I'd like to see more from this genre because you can only get so creative with the standard turn-based rpgs. I need some more story as well to really keep me hooked to turn-based ones because I occasionally get rushed and get lazy and skip dialog with some of the more boring ones.

KaynSlamdyke:

VRaptorX:
And I don't see anyone cosplaying as anything american.....outside of Ash from Evil Dead.

I dunno. Large white hoodie, some white cloth to extrend it, a load of latex knives and a latex sabre, oh and something to hold the wristblade...

Altair would make an awesome person to cosplay. Get some of your mates to bring in some cheap looking armour with red crosses on it and you can assassinate one of them in the middle of the crowd, and have a sword fight in the parking lot. It'd be fun.

((Edit: Okay, yes, Assassins Creed is a Canadian game from a French publisher. I was assuming American as a synonym for Western))

yeah....youd be right on that last sentence. I really gotta work on that.

VRaptorX:
. That and....let's face it....who in USA buys RPGs mostly? The cosplayers.

What? That doesn't even make sense.

Oh cockrocket. I like FPS too much to allow it to die. *sigh* Oh well.

I think the 3rd person action/adventure is going to have a strong showing this year (don't know about being dominant). Especially now they are getting given a more sandbox-esque makeover. Off the top of my head I can think of Alone In The Dark, Alan Wake, Splinter Cell - Conviction, Prototype, etc.

I think that mummorpuggers could be the next big thing. Personally, however i can't stand their grind.

What about fighting games?

VikingRhetoric:

VRaptorX:
. That and....let's face it....who in USA buys RPGs mostly? The cosplayers.

What? That doesn't even make sense.

That too was generalizing (and exaggeration). I'm just saying a majority of RPG fans are mainly at least a little obsessive over Japan. You don't see the Madden guys playing RPGs anytime soon do ya?

Yeah, I do actually.

Not really a genre, but episodic gaming seems to be the hizzle in everyone's nizzle. (I apologise for that phrase. Just had to use it.)

I don't think MMORPG's are going to get any bigger than they have already been over the last 5 years.
WOW
Everyquest 1/II
Guild Wars
COH/COV
EVE Online
Thinking about those titles you can see that genre is no longer thriving.

To take a better guess at what genre could rise up over the next 2 years (giving a timeline because a genre's lifespan is normally 3-6 years at most), you have to look to the past. See what games gave the genres a boost and how it was done.

It can be argued that FPS's have always been strong in the market. And that is mostly because of it's strong foundations. But I think the most recent swell was within the HD Console revolution and to a degree, the increase in hi-tech PC's becomming more affordable.

I think it was, ironically, DOOM III that gave the FPS genre a good kick in terms of the swell of games it has now.

3rd-person shooters I'm not so sure what did it. Obviously Gears of War was massive. But so was GRAW. Before that... I can't remember...tribes? HA!

Anyway, what I'm saying is by reviewing what has happened in the past you might be better guess what's to come (duuuuh hahaha)

(not proof-read, at work)

MMO's.

People want to play togheter in a persistant ever-developing world.
Unfortunatly those who create MMO's kinda loose track about ever-developing and think "Hey, let's create a few instances they can run into" - eg. How Yathzee describes Sim City Societies to avoid the citizens to realize that they live in a bubble society.

doubleDizz:
It can be argued that FPS's have always been strong in the market. And that is mostly because of it's strong foundations. But I think the most recent swell was within the HD Console revolution and to a degree, the increase in hi-tech PC's becomming more affordable.

I think it was, ironically, DOOM III that gave the FPS genre a good kick in terms of the swell of games it has now.

No way. The recent surge in FPS is due to the fact that despite being a relatively old genre, it's still pretty 'new' to consoles. FPS didn't really take off on consoles until Halo and the subsequent Halo clones. Once Halo showed that FPS games could be played on consoles with just a regular controller, it took off.

Anyways, I think it's pretty easy to see that the next dominate genre for video games will be casual games.

Here is me hoping co-op games will be the next big thing, over all genres.

Open world games are booming right now. MMOs are likely to be around for a while. If RTSs can be perfected on a console then I think they might have a strong future. The way people have less and less time it seems to me that casual games and things like Portal and Echochrome have a good chance of being the games of choice for those above the age of 25.

purifiedinfire:
although i hate them, MMORPG's are getting more and more popular. i really hope that stops.

Seconded... At least, I hope for every MMORPG we get three different genre games... Or one super good one to tide us over...

I played Guild Wars for ~5 months until I was old enough to work. It was ok I guess but idk nothing gets me like a console based rpg that is NOT a Fetch Quest(BOO JADE EMPIRE!)