Sticking to the Trend

Why is it here in the Philippines, multiplayer pc games always follow just a few core games? Bakit nila linalaro ang uso? Why do they play what's in the trend? Like back in 1998, I was at high school and there was a start in the Internet / LAN gaming areas because of games like Starcraft and Red Alert. A group of us would go in the shop and play an hour's game of Starcraft after school in a nearby mall. We would play in either one of two LAN gaming areas where one had 20 computers and the other had 16 though there were lots of arcade areas in the mall. After a half a year of Starcraft and Broodwar, we moved on to Alien versus Predator then jumped to Quake and finally Rainbow Six. Everyone else at this time was still playing Starcraft at the shop except us. Soon Rainbow Six was the best thing. We'd play it the following year consistently until this game mod - Counter Strike came out.

I guess we played Counter Strike a good full year before it became the in thing. It was just Beta 4.0 and I enjoyed the fact you could join in anytime unlike the slow and fixed starting of Rainbow Six. When Counter Strike evolved to Beta 6.0, the LAN gaming boom erupted. What used to be 2 gaming areas doubled to 4 and reached up to 8 (where 4 of them were using really old pcs). Counter Strike was all the rage during my third year in high school but I was already longing to get back to Rainbow Six. At this point, CS now had wall hacks, invisible skins and aim bots rampant which annoyed me. I didn't like those cheats or even know how to do them yet I was still one of the best in my class. CS beta 7 and version 1 was already boring me and my friends so we jumped to AvP 2 and Serious Sam while others was still playing the hacked CS.

Moving to college, Counter Strike was still the most played game. The game that succeeded the Counter Strike generation was DotA. I did play some Warcraft 3 skirmishes and definitely my favorite maps were survival and hero arena types. DotA became the only game people played at LAN gaming stores besides the one or two MMORPG players. Even at my last years of college, DotA was still huge though a few MMOs have gotten big. During college, Dawn of War was my game. Dawn of War for me and my friends was a superior alternative to Starcraft and DotA.

So what made those games all popular? Why is it that when asked what game they want to play; it's Starcraft 2. Why is it that Red Alert 3 got so much hype here and not Dawn of War 2 or Company of Heroes or Supreme Commander? Is it because our LAN gaming areas earn more with low end PCs as MMOs don't have a huge system requirements? Most pc gamers here don't even know the difference between a 1024 MB 7300gt video card to a 512 MB 9800 gt video card. They still think that big video memory is better and ignore the GPU (graphics processor). What's the next big multiplayer shooter game here? It's certainly not Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead which are played mostly online at home and only with the truly hardcore.

Is LAN gaming dying here in the country? Will it soon be replaced by those Korean MMOs or are we stuck with DotA and CS forever? I'll be trying several new games over the weekend.