Dark Souls was not the first difficult game. It was the first difficult game to make difficulty itself the selling point — to design every element, from the save system to the world layout to the UI, around the experience of mastery over time. The subsequent decade's most influential games all engage with the Dark Souls question: how much difficulty is rewarding, and what makes difficulty meaningful?

The Last of Us set a standard for narrative production quality that has become the expectation for major releases rather than the exception. Motion capture, voice performance, directing quality, and pacing — all achieved a level of craft that subsequent AAA games were expected to match. The industry's investment in narrative departments and cinematic toolsets increased substantially in the years following its release.

Minecraft proved that a game with essentially no designed content could sustain a larger audience than any content-delivered title through user creativity alone. The user-generated content model — which now drives the entire Roblox ecosystem and influences every survival game — was proven viable by Minecraft's commercial success at a time when the idea was considered a niche experiment.