Recently I read an article on
how there hasn't been a new genre in 10 years. In which the arguments presented seem to have a few fundamental flaws. The first is how genres come to be, generally a genre is just a form of game classification grown large enough to need to be easily distinguished from games unlike them. In 1982 people most likely called Pitfall an action game, whereas in the early 90's it'd be classified as a platformer as by that time a large number of similar games had popped up by the early 90's.
Another good example is how the FPS genre came to be. In the 70's Space Invaders came out and caused such a ruckus that it inspired many similar games which were pretty much Space Invader clones. After this the games evolved to be different enough from Space Invaders to be considered a clone but similar enough in game style that the shooter genre was born. Fast forward to the 90's, where Wolf3D and Doom came out and inspired a bunch of games often labelled as Doom clones. The gameplay evolved again and the need to classify Doom style games from their parent genre created yet another subgenre the first person shooter, which today is probably one of the most popular and mainstream genre.
An example of one of these subgenres to pop up within the last 10 years would be Tower Defense, which I believe started as a Warcraft 3 mod but since then has inspired several hundred games across several platforms. Another up and coming genre that has no set name but is generally referred to as an open world or sandbox games is evolving from games which would previously be labeled Grand Theft Auto 3 clones. Another couple examples of yet to be definitely named genres are genres I like to call physics puzzlers which has games like Boom Blox,
Line Rider,
Totem Destroyer, or Spate(I'll link once it's public). Then there's games which I've been calling play with yourself games which include games like
Cursor *10,
Chronotron, or even
Choke on my Groundhog you Bastard Robots.
So in summary the only way you're not seeing the recent game genres is if you're putting on your blinders so tight you're ignoring the similarly typed games of a broader classification just waiting to be more tightly classified.
