Good evening you are listening to Throneous ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakeney here once again with freelance writer, T.J. Hafer.

Hello, hello.

We also welcome Games Beat's Blogger of the decade, Rowan Kaiser.

Good morning.

And finally, up way past his bedtime, we have our old friend, Fraser Brown.

Hello.

So this week we're going to be talking about the decade that was the 2010s, the major trends that emerged to define the era,

the games that stood out in their genres, and the games that tell the story of why some genres

grew while others may have withered or even vanished. But before we get into those sorts of specifics,

I think a good place to start this discussion of like what happened across this decade.

And I'm referring now to a very helpful one sheet that Rowan prepared in advance of the show

with big ideas and lots of important games we should discuss.

So thank you, Rowan.

I'm going to crib liberally from this as we go through.

But one of the things you cited right out of the gate was this is a decade where digital distribution not only comes into its own,

but also profoundly changes what it means to have a game come out and

what it means for us to experience a game as an audience once it's live.

Yeah, we did a kind of most important games of the decade list article type of thing over at Games Beat. And I was like, I have to do 2012

and I have to do Crusader Kings 2 because Crusader Kings 2 is really emblematic of the decade

in that like when K2 came out, it was a disaster. Like it had 20,000 sales in the first month, but some of those sales or, you know, press codes went to people who were like, wait, holy shit. This game is actually a really amazing strategic new way of doing strategy games that we have not seen this kind of like role-playing character arc emergent stories.

And so, like, word of mouth kept that game going, being on streaming, kept that game going.

And then, like, Paradox constantly releasing patches and updates and expansions and little flags and ruler customization

...