A bit old but - RPG Codex's 2012-2016 GOTY Results

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10535

...Then came 2012, and things changed. Or it felt like they changed.

First, Legend of Grimrock came out of nowhere (with productions values above RPG Maker levels!) reviving the real-time blobber sub-genre, dead since the 90's. Then Dark Souls got a PC port (something rare back then) and, more importantly, Kickstarter became a thing. That year we all saw Brian Fargo sell us on a dream of RPG revival, spearheaded by Wasteland 2 and soon followed by Shadowrun: Returns, Pillars of Eternity, Dead State, Banner Saga, Xenonauts, FTL: Faster Than Light, Legends of Eisenwald, Hero-U, Barkley 2, Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, etc...

This began what many called The Age of Incline, a hopeful return to our past glory....

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Yes, the winner is The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt - and by a large margin: almost 60% of everyone who played rated it 5/5.

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Data included for anyone who likes spreadsheets.

Dark Soul 5th and Dragon"s Dogma 7th best RPG among those released between 2012 and 2013? Sigh, not that I'm surprised of this spotlight, so Codex is a bunch of console players. To each their own, but even AoD second, is seriously ridiculous, despite at least it's a true RPG.

EDIT: At least I quote that a game as Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok vanished from their tops, it takes time to clean their minds, but at least it can happens, not that it's a bad game, but it's just a fairly good Adventure game and a weak RPG.

I think the "age of Incline" might have taken a break last year. Though it was sure a good year for catching up on backlogs. I'm still expecting at least 5 RPGs to show up this year that would have been RPG of the year if they had shown up last year.

Dragon's Dogma (2016 for PC gamers) was a pretty good one! Some good, new ideas in there, too.

Invisible Inc, FTL, Xenaunots, Tome, NEO Scavenger, Heroin's Quest, Valkyria Chronicles, Dark Soul series, that are just examples showing it's a very extended definition of RPG.

Firstly have FTL or Invisible Inc in the list and not XCOM or XCOM 2 is ridiculous and just show how wrong and manipulative is this community.

But that's not the point, I'm not saying it's not valid just that it's another point of view and the analysis is pretty wrong in that context.

For a very extended vision of RPG, the Incline started in 2007. I have done those lists too and even quoted for example that for 2005 he doesn't have the full list. I'm not saying my lists are full, but there's a clear number change from 2007 and it didn't decline in term of quantity. Depending of the year, the clear reason has two sources:
- The multiplication of indie games using RPG elements, but almost none of those indie dev are able to do a true full RPG.
- The invasion of JRPG on the platform starting really in 2014. I read some article explaining the origin was Dark Soul PC release, in my opinion a more simple explanation is Steam becoming more and more a console players platform, through multiplication of generations of players coming from console and deeply attached to them.

The only incline and starting only in 2013 not 2012, is the amount of full true RPG (not roguelite, action games, JRPG, and many more) increased a bit, but really not much in term of number, for sure it's more significant in term of percentage because numbers are small, so a few releases can make quite a change to percentages.

In fact from the perspective of releases of true full WRPG it never changed much and the only break down is from 1994 to 1995. And the only true big rise up is during 1989-1993, but including all computers releases, particularly on Amiga. I don't have yet the full numbers for that period, it's just big during that years and nothing comparable in any era.