[QUOTE="Jag85"]
Like with COD, simply having the most sales or users does not equate to most influential. Happy Farm was already a huge social network phenomenon in China, where it had tens of millions of users, a year before FarmVille existed. And even in America, the Happy Farm clone "Farm Town" also had tens of millions of users before FarmVille appeared. FarmVille certainly contributed to bringing up the numbers much higher, but that doesn't make it the most influential. It is simply the Happy Farm clone with the most users.
Maroxad
But it did the most to make social gaming the phenomenon it is today. Right?
As said, a game does not need to be innovative to be influential. Heck most of the most influential games of all time were not innovative at all. Take Half Life for instance.
I wasn't talking solely about originality (since Happy Farm was itself heavily inspired by the Harvest Moon series, adapted for a social networking environment), but more about how many other works were inspired by it. My point is that even before FarmVille, social network games were already a phenomenon in Asia due to Happy Farm (where it inspired many clones, had a reverse influence on the Harvest Moon series, and where FarmVille is still largely unknown) and was also already starting to become a phenomenon in the West due to its clone Farm Town.
[QUOTE="Jag85"]Everyone seems to have forgotten the most obvious answer:
Wii Sports
Both COD and GOW combined don't come anywhere near the kind of influence that Wii Sports has had on the gaming industry as a whole for these past five years.
But between COD and GOW, I'd choose GOW as the more influential, simply because the over-the-shoulder cover system that it popularized has been more influential than any possible mechanic COD may have popularized. Selling more copies does not make COD more influential.
exiledsnake
Really? What influence has Wii Sports made? And to quote you "selling copies does not make it more influential".
COD is definitely more influential than GeoW. GeoW did the cover mechanic well and paved the way for TPS games but COD4 intergrated into their multiplayer killstreaks, perks, a levelling system and they topped it all off with fast-paced multiplayer gameplay. Sure the formula hasn't changed much since COD4 but you can't deny that it still works for so many people and that so many other FPS games are trying to pull off something similar.
Of course I'm not talking about sales. Instead, ask yourself this: how many games did Wii Sports inspire, and in comparison, how many games did COD and GOW inspire? It should be pretty obvious that the amount of games that Wii Sports inspired (literally in the hundreds) completely dwarfs both COD and GOW combined (at most, maybe a dozon each).
As for GOW and COD, GOW was the one that popularized a whole new sub-genre of games, the cover-based third-person shooter. COD did maybe popularize one or two mechanics, but you should keep in mind that first-person shooters were already hugely popular long before COD came along (Halo anyone?). In contrast, third-person shooters were not that popular before GOW came along, but ever since then, TPS games have been giving the traditionally more dominant FPS genre a run for its money. That alone makes GOW more influential than COD in my eyes.
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