8 Biggest Gaming Trends From The PS3 and Xbox 360 Era

11 July 2025

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8-biggest-gaming-trends-from-the-ps3-and-xbox-360-era — 8 Biggest Gaming Trends From The PS3 and Xbox 360 Era

Summary

Xbox 360 launched the HD era in 2005, Sony caught up with PS3, and Nintendo thrived with the Wii.
The rise of digital games, indie classics, and DLC changed the gaming landscape for better or worse.
Cover shooters took off with Gears of War in 2006, open-world games dominated the era, and motion controls evolved.

The HD era officially began in 2005 when Microsoft beat Sony and Nintendo to the punch with their Xbox 360 console. Because of this, they got an advantage over Sony at least, although Nintendo would pull their own weight with the success of the Wii.

collage with Gears of War 2 and Forza Horizon 1

These iconic titles can only be exclusively played on the Xbox 360.

Sony did struggle but eventually got out of their lull a few years in to catch up to the Xbox 360 in terms of sales and quality of games. Even though the Wii is not an HD system, it will be included in this breakdown of the trends that started around 2005 and 2006. This examination will look and see if those trends are still being felt to this day.

8 Digital Games

The Rise Of Indies And Returning To Classics

Indie games have existed as long as the Internet has been around, but it wasn’t until this console generation that they were easily distributable through digital storefronts. Braid, Castle Crashers, and Super Meat Boy helped pave the way for indie games on the Xbox 360 console.

Players could eventually download full games from digital stores and even get demos too. For classic game fans, there was even a way to play their favorite titles from their youth, from PS1 games on the PS3 to NES games on the Wii, and all of these trends are better than ever on current consoles.

7 DLC

Furthering Your Quest In-Between Sequels

Horse armor in The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion

The digital store shelves also allowed companies to update games with free patches and paid DLC. This made games last longer in lieu of companies creating a sequel right away. It didn’t start well because The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion got panned with its horse armor.

However, eventually, there were some solid DLC campaigns like Minerva’s Den in BioShock 2 and Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption. DLC is also alive and well, for better or worse, on modern consoles.

6 Cover Shooters

Gears Of Win

Cover shooters could be seen to have started in arcades in the 90s with games like Time Crisis or for consoles, kill.switch on the previous generation of consoles. Gears of War launched for the Xbox 360 in 2006 and reclaimed that mechanic for its own, and now most cite it as the game that popularized cover mechanics at the very least.

Nathan Drake from Uncharted and Joel and Ellie from the Last of Us with a PS3 console over them

The PS3 deserves to be remembered fondly for its extensive library of games, with some of the best titles in all of gaming featured on this console.

Other notable games from this generation include the Uncharted and Army of Two franchises, which bled into the next generation a bit. While cover shooters are not as prominent today compared to normal third-person shooters or FPS games, this still pops up occasionally.

5 Walking Slowly Through Transmissions

And Audio Diaries

Listening to audio diary in Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine

There was a habit in games like Gears of War or Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine to slow down character movement while they received a transmission, and it was about as fun as the quick-time event boom of the previous console generation.

This trend has thankfully almost gone away, except when remasters come out. There was a better audio-based mechanic via audio logs that clued players into additional lore, like in BioShock. This was sort of an evolution of finding notes in games like Resident Evil, although notes are still the primary environmental storytelling device that developers use, while audio logs have mostly faded away.

4 Motion Controls

Sony And Microsoft Chase Nintendo

Perhaps the wildest thing Microsoft and Sony did during this generation was chase the motion control boom that the Wii introduced when it launched in 2006. It took both companies until 2010 to jump on board with the Kinect and PlayStation Move.

They did not find the success that the Wii had, but motion controls evolved. Motion controls have helped create immersive VR experiences, like with PSVR, and Nintendo still technically has motion control support via their Joy-Cons on the Switch and Switch 2, but it’s not really a supported trend like it was during the first HD era.

3 Yearly Sequels

Move Over Sports

Waiting for a sequel in the 80s and 90s was torture because most games never had an EXACT release date like they do now, and also players couldn’t look things up online. Sometimes it took years, but the one type of game that players could count on in the 90s to get yearly sequels was sports games like Madden. This remained true for years until the HD era.

A collage with some of the best Wii games: Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros Brawl.

The Wii is one of the most successful video game consoles of all time, with every year of the system’s life featuring great motion-controlled games.

Call of Duty wasn’t very big when it launched in 2003, but starting with Call of Duty 2 in 2005, which was a launch Xbox 360 game, Activision made sure there was an entry every single year, which they have not missed since 2005. Another game that started small was Assassin’s Creed, which was released in 2007. Its sequel was released in 2009, and up through 2015, Ubisoft remained steady with sequels, too. Both of these franchises proved it wasn’t just possible for sports games to make sequels every year, but unfortunately, tedium did start to settle in.

2 Rock Bands

Going Beyond Guitars

Guitar Hero was released not quite in time for the Xbox 360 launch in 2005, as the first game was exclusive to the PS2. While it and its sequel saw success, it wouldn’t be until 2007 that an all-out declaration of war broke loose via Rock Band.

A year later, Guitar Hero answered back with their own band equipment game via Guitar Hero World Tour. Konami chased the trend too with Rock Revolution, which was panned, and Ubisoft got Rocksmith up and running for those who actually wanted to learn how to play just the guitar. This was a wild time for plastic instruments that burned hot and had an encore in the next generation, but it wasn’t met with as much praise.

1 Open-World Games

The Dominant Genre’s Birth

Using fire in The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim

Open-world games evolved heavily in this generation thanks to the consoles having more computing power. Players got world maps in RPGs or sandbox cities before titles like Red Dead Redemption, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and Far Cry 3 absolutely destroyed their scope of what it meant to be free.

Beyond digital storefronts, open-world games are probably the biggest genre trend from this HD era that hasn’t gone away yet. There is some fatigue, though, as not everyone can play ten massive open-world games and finish them in a single year, but so far, the crash hasn’t fully happened yet.