Ten years ago, we published two roundtable features on IGN; one that asked a broad panel of industry insiders to look back at the decade leading up to 2010 and one that charged them with prognosticating on what they thought gaming would be like in 2020. (We recently took a look at how accurate those predictions proved to be.) We’ve now pulled together a new panel of more than 30 industry veterans to recreate the same concept, with everything from indie to triple A, mobile to PC, and casual to core covered off. In this feature our panel answers two questions looking back at the last ten years. Please note that we haven’t included all responses, and some responses have been edited for length. Responses have also been grouped into broad themes. [poilib element="accentDivider"] In the first part of this feature, our roundtable members answer the question:

What have been the most important changes in video games, video game technology, and in the wider video game industry over the last ten years?

Democratisation

Tanya X. Short, Co-Founder, Kitfox Games (Moon Hunters): Creating video games has become much, much more accessible. It used to be that games were all made by people who as children happened to take an interest in programming. A few newbie-friendly engines were around ten years ago, but now they've been normalized and rightly celebrated. With all the resources available both online and the variety of tools, you can literally have no experience with programming, and wake up one morning wanting to make a game, and have something playable by dinner. Heck, lunch, depending on when you tend to wake up in the morning. This accessibility has made game development and games themselves much more diverse, but it's also ratcheted up the competition, in the indie and mid-tier space. Andy Sum, Director, Hipster Whale (Crossy Road): Every step in the chain from creating to publishing a game has become more accessible. Unity and Unreal are now both free to use and the rapid increase in user generated content means that there's more tutorials and information on how to start creating games. Because of this, over the past ten years, there have been more games created and many new people involved in the video game industry. Distribution has changed to keep up with this too. Steam opened up Greenlight, Early Access, and then Steam Direct. Crowdfunding like Kickstarter has also helped fund many developer's projects. Multiple digital stores have appeared worldwide. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/06/22/hollow-knight-review"]

Hollow Knight started out as a Kickstarter project.