> I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.

This is exactly what I was thinking when writing this list, along with noting that OP mentioned games from the late 90's at the latest - my timeline for "recent" was pretty wide.

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"Culturally Relevant" to me means one of two things:

* So many people played the damn thing that it entered the public consciousness outside of gaming focused communities, and stayed there for a decent amount of time.

* It had a significant and fairly enduring influence on the design of later titles made by other studios.

You can tell within a few months whether a game is in the former category (Elden Ring, Palworld, Minecraft, Among Us, BG3 etc), but it takes years to know whether a game is in the second category (Dark Souls, also Minecraft to an extent, Path of Exile, Witcher 3, Tarkov etc).

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great and impactful games from recent years, I was just struck that the list of "recent" games were particularly old from the perspective of actual new games like the ones you mention. I missed the mention of Elden Ring in the original post, it wasn't deliberate on my part to skip it.

And indeed, PoE of 11 years ago isn't comparable, even PoE pre-delirium probably isn't recognisable to current PoE, and anything pre Incursion certainly isn't, but that's the nature of a live-service game. The power creep post-conquerors has been incredible, and there's been essentially no effort to bring that in after they decided that a reset with PoE2 would be preferable than trying to rein in power creep in modern PoE, and that adding upper end aspiration content instead was preferable.

The decision to rein in power with expedition backfired so hard that people still complain they don't have an item editor with harvest. ( Although with Locks it's come pretty close again at the right cost. )

I think they made a good choice, PoE is better than ever, but it's controversial, and every patch post 3.14 has had a lot of detractors claiming that "PoE is ruined".

In terms of cultural impact, it's still interesting that it's such an "old" game that's having an impact on (gaming) culture.

If we're talking about wider culture, you're right that "culturally significant" can take time to materialise. I'm not sure Alyx or even Hades really makes the cut. They're great games of their genre but I don't think they've had the cut through that the others you've listed have had.

Among Us was a cultural phenomenon that was immediately visible outside of gaming, akin to something like Fortnite although perhaps magnified by the pandemic massively boosting streaming audiences and people looking for some kind of social connection through the internet.

Survivors has had a massive impact on gaming, it's created a genre of it's own ("Survivors-like" is a thing) which can be seen with the release of "DeepRockGalactic: Survivors" which is a great improvement on the genre. It's fair to say that while Vampire Survivors itself might not have the cultural cut through, it defined a genre of games that have inspired clones from Brotato to DRG and deserves its place on that list if we're looking at gaming culture, but it's too soon to say if we're looking at culture outside of gaming.