Shroud: “FPS is a genre that will never die”

Shroud answered viewer questions at the end of an Elders Scroll V: Skyrim stream last week and posted the highlights on YouTube yesterday. And one of the questions was about the lifespan of FPS games: Are FPS games dying?

“FPS is in its high point right now and the highest it’s ever been in terms of players,” Shroud said. And when comparing VALORANT to other FPS games, he said Riot’s upcoming title could last more than 10 years.

His statement makes sense when looking at how long some of the other top first-person shooters have been around. 

• 17 years: Call of Duty started out in 2003, launching several spin-offs with the most recent from 2019, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 
• 19 years: Halo entered the spotlight in 2001 and has released many successful additions to the game series. The next main installment is Halo Infinite, which is set to be released later this year. 
• 20 years: Counter-Strike was released in 1999, but took one year to be commercialized. CS:GO was released in 2012 and is the fourth installment in the series. 
• 22 years: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is the oldest of the bunch, released in 1998. The franchise has a bunch of titles, with Rainbow Six Siege being the most recent from 2015.

The most-streamed games on Twitch demonstrate how popular the FPS genre still is. Some of the more recent battle royale games that feature FPS-style gameplay have dominated the viewership charts, like Fortnite since 2017 and Apex Legends since 2019. VALORANT is still in closed beta and is the second most-streamed game right now, according to Twitch statistics website SullyGnome.

FPS games have been around for as long as 47 years. Historians point at 1973 as the year of the first FPS game with Maze War for the Imlac PDS-1 computers installed at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Shroud thinks differently about RTS games, however. During his stream, he said real-time strategy games are at the end of their lives. “RTS games are done unless they get revitalized through another genre,” Shroud said.

The Mixer streamer thinks there won’t be many RTS game releases in the future unless the mechanics appear as a complement to another main genre. He mentions Natural Selection as an example, a modification for Half-Life that’s manly an FPS but has an RTS spin.

Shroud found it funny that some people in the chat didn’t know what RTS is, almost proving his point. The genre isn’t popular in the streaming community, but it still has titles coming out. The term real-time strategy is a bit younger than first-person shooter, though, being used to market Dune II in the early 1990s.