Point and clicks also seem to have developed into those hidden object games. I don;t like them but many of our soccer moms do.

Wow, that's more replies that I expected to come back to!!

Thanks for all the info guys, will have to work my way through it all slowly.

Realistic combat flight sims perhaps? At least modern ones.

Extreme form of contraception.

I think action games where the protagonist is not a human or at least humanoid in general. Until the late 90's action games where you controlled a vehicle rather than a human being, whether it was realistic air planes or tanks or something sci-fi like some hover tank, space ship or mech, were pretty much the norm and often among the biggest releases. I guess this was gradually killed, first mainly by first person shooters and later more and more also by third person games. It only occurred to me rather recently how rare these kinds of games have become and virtually extinct among AAA titles. Sure, there's still vehicular combat these days but usually just as a feature of a game where you control a human being that CAN assume control of vehicles.

It's particularly crazy because these kinds of games should be a lot cheaper to produce, saving developers tons of animations and requiring lower graphical fidelity. I get it that, for example, a game that allows you to "be a high tech police vehicle" (like in G-Police or Future Cop) isn't as marketable as a game where you're an alcoholic cop on a path of revenge for the murder of his wife who can control sci-fi vehicles but come on, it's so much wasted potential design-wise. It really occurred to me when I played Dark Void not that long ago which, admittedly, is largely a mediocre cover based third person shooter but at least let me catch a glimpse of what would be possible if we had more games like Crimson Skies or Rogue Squadron these days. Most importantly it was huge fun to me because it played fundamentally differently than 99% of action games these days. Plus, games like Wing Commander showed us that you CAN have that highly marketable human element in a game that is about some sort of vehicular combat.

Sadly when we do get games focused on vehicular combat these days they usually seem to be twin stick shooters and such where the fact that you're controlling some badass vehicle doesn't really affect the gameplay that much. Well, and/or the game gets no genuine story or characters whatsoever (although I can do without that if the gameplay is really good).

Point & click adventure games are doing pretty well actually. It's quite a popular genre with indie devs, and a lot of great p&c adventuures have been released in the recent years.

RTS games indeed are at life support now. I think MOBAs are what drained what life was left in the genre. There hasn't been a really major RTS release other than Starcraft 2 in many years, and even Blizzard is all about it's Heroes of the Storm MOBA now (which itself I think takes a back seat to Hearthstone and Overwatch).

You mean really hyped release.

And yes there are not many games today, but they do release. For example Ashes of Singularity. Or Syrian Warfare (though it's more real time tactics than strategy).

Here's another one: Non-bullet-hell shoot em'ups.

The only real big change in the point-and-click world, if you ask me, is that the market moved more toward indies than before. The games might not seem as grand and complex and sweeping or on as big of a budget as they used to, but then, it all depends on what era you're looking at and what you're using as your examples.

The adventure game genre is dead because most devs have no clue how to make logical puzzles, and almost no one likes playing the illogical puzzles that they do make.

The RTS genre is dead is because the Blizzard RTS games turned it into an extreme hardcore micromanagement chore and after a while people realized that such gameplay is not strategic (winning simply boils down to whoever has faster & more accurate fine motor skills in their fingers and therefore can hit more keys & mouseclicks per minute) and not fun.

LA Noire was a huge hit 5 years ago, and it's a crying shame that this style of gameplay never took off. It overhauled the puzzle-based adventure in a way that was long overdue.

Then again, it's understandable that pubs and devs may be reluctant to make that kind of budgetary investment in a game with such a short playthrough time.

The "death of x" or "decline of x" is a viewpoint often made by people who can't be bothered to look at the world around them.

These days, I find myself rather short on patience with these types. They have made it clear that the world has moved on without them - and that they are quite happy to remain in their self-imposed bubble.

And it hurts even more that the game Whore of the Orient was officially cancelled last year. It was developed by the same studio as L.A. Noire and was intended to take place in Shanghai with similar game mechanics. It would be rather good to enjoy a new L.A. Noire with its unique gameplay in the future, although it could get dull sometimes.

It's not like they were any more logical back when the genre seemingly ruled the world. If anything, it's the opposite.

Yup. I absolutely agree. Whenever I remember the "classics" or the "greatest" point & click adventure games, there's always one or two really obnoxious and obtuse puzzles I associate with each of them. And while some of these games that are being made today do feature the occasional illogical puzzle, the tendency is to simplify things; focus more on narrative and character development and less on puzzles. I haven't been stuck in an adventure game in years, now, at least not to the point of that stupid rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, the much dreaded "kick the crack" puzzle in Full Throttle or the downright absurd (if you lived outside the US and were just a little kid with little-to-no grasp of English, like me) monkey wrench puzzle in Secret of Monkey Island -- looking at this one years later, it *is* logical... kinda, I guess. But it was still unbelievably hard for me, back in the day.

Also, most of Daedalic's more well-known games are also famous for their oftentimes extremely hard puzzles. Overall, though, I think that's it. Some exception or other amongst the Wadjet Eye catalogue, too.

I, for one, welcome the less obtuse puzzles of today. And the fact still stands that, whether you find the puzzles of today's point & clickers easy or hard (your mileage may vary, I've met a girl who thought all the puzzles in The Longest Journey were extremely logical and they all made sense to her, while she struggled with even the simplest hurdles in the first Broken Sword), it doesn't mean the genre is dead. It's far from being dead, actually; it's just not as dominant as it was in the past, but it's definitely flourishing.


[EDIT] As for RTS games... I honestly wouldn't know. I was never really into strategy games, real time or otherwise, so I guess I'm not really interested in looking for them and, thus, I don't know if they still make them today, or not. I'm under the assumption, though, that they aren't in as a healthy situation as the point & clicks seem to be.