Turns out that people like playing games that respect their time and aren’t a glorified second job. Who knew.
that respect their time
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
Hah, just edited the comment for you.
The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft… My job is a second job.
Tell that to everyone playing games like path of exile (which i admittedly have also played too much of in the past).
PoE, Factorio, etc
I seem to like games that require spreadsheets
Built a new killer rig last summer. Have spent 90% of my time with it playing HL1 mods.
Recently upgraded to a 7800x3D, 64GB DDR5, and a 4070… which I’ve been using to get back into modded Minecraft recently.
Same machine… The framerates I’m getting in Rimworld are off the charts.
Tbf, the larger modpacks can be pretty resource intensive.
I am on a 6 year old computer playing 10 year old games. I don’t see a need to upgrade anytime soon.
I’m on a 5 year old computer playing 20-30 year old games. I’m good over here. 😂
I bet WoW runs like a dream on that machine 😂
I haven’t tried it! That would be like giving a reformed crack addict a hit off the pipe. 😂 No way can I ever even consider going back to that game.
If it makes you feel better, it will never be the same as it was when you first played. Every time there is a xpac that looks interesting I have tried and failed to get that feeling back. It devolves very quickly into feeling like a job again.
I just feel bad for my gnome warlock, endlessly flying around in purgatory on his magic carpet…
I do hate being in the never ending upgrade cycle but the 10 year old games are limited, at least the ones I like to play.
New games just don’t have a ‘punch’ to it anymore. They are not not game breaking anymore.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with old games either. They are the same as they were, which is why reboots and remakes are so popular.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess…
A good story isn’t something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
Because crypto miners ruined gaming top end GPUs used to be $300 Max, now were looking in the thousands to have the best GPU for like 6 months, and you can’t buy a used one because it could be a clapped out card used in a crypto miner
Bitcoin switched to industrial ASICs a long time ago, and Ethereum has completely moved away from proof-of-work mining in 2022, see: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked, no one mines with GPUs anymore, at least not for any major blockchain. GPUs are mainly being used with AI now
That doesn’t mean that their effect on the GPU market will up and vanish overnight. Market correction doesn’t usually go down as fast as it goes up.
Edit: add to that the tariff situation and the standoff with China and Taiwan (where all the processors for gpus are made), and you have a situation where things are just going to get more expensive no matter what.
It’s AI at this point. Nvidia considers the gamer division to be vestigial. They were a $700B market cap company that was primarily known for gaming GPUs. They are now quadruple that with AI, and that’s even with some recent hits to their stock price.
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
I don’t follow crypto trends so I hadn’t heard about this either.
I had to look up proof-of-stake, and for Ethereum apparently is required to stake 32 coins to operate a node. Another google search shows me a single Ethereum coin is just north of $2k USD. So someone mining Etherium today needs to have more than $64k if Etherium to even run a node now?!
Pay to play baby! Let’s reinvent the banking system by doing the same exact shit.
Not really to be honest, the power is in the decentralization, permissionless and opensource nature of the system. You can’t get that out of the traditional system
Of course not all networks are the same and there are always shit ones out there that compromise on those tenets, but if you do your due dilligence, you will see there is value in some of them
No, not really, you can start staking with as many as you want, see pooled staking: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/pools/
Staking pools are a collaborative approach to allow many with smaller amounts of ETH to obtain the 32 ETH required to activate a set of validator keys
You earn rewards proportional to the amount you stake
You only need 32 ETH to stake if you want to solo stake / home stake and you don’t pool resources with anyone else, see https://ethereum.org/en/staking/solo/
It was 4k per coin. Source: me as I cry with my 2 ETH. 😭
I don’t think it’s even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I’m probably not getting in on launch because there’s a big chance I’ll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n’th time, because I feel like that’s what I want to play. I’ll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.
IMO, GPU prices have an impact. Modern gaming has a bad habit of not optimizing games relying on people getting newer GPUs for performance.
Mix that with the pre-order/early access monetization, and we are to a point where games have made their money before release, and beans counters don’t want to put money in QA because there is no quantifiable ROI (there is a ROI, but it is hard to quantify), which is a no-no in their world.
Indie games have a tendancy to be less GPU demanding, and thus, usually have a better performance experience
Yep, that’s the thing. Games have to be bigger, better, more fun than ever before, and yet the publishers and management want it to be done quicker and quicker than ever before, so it’s a pretty difficult thing. That, combined with bad working conditions and the public shitting on you because “game devs are shitty/greedy/etc” with developers being used coloquially to absorb all the blame that should be reserved for management, and things are in a pretty tough spot.
Though, at the same time, it’s a better time now than ever before to actually be a gamer, because not only can you play any half-decent new games, but you can also play the entire library of older games, retro games, etc.
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They’re too expensive, often don’t run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don’t have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won’t enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It’s why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I’m going to buy a title.
New AAA games suck.
I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
I don’t know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it’s hard to make good games period. I’m not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
What’s your opinion on Dome Keeper?
Totally. Even with good new games, best to wait until they are cheap and completely stable. The impatience to play something the day it releases hasn’t been a thing for me since like 2010… which I agree with you were just generally better, more exciting times for the medium.
Amen. I also have a ton of issues with contemporary game design—padding playtime with procedural generation, prioritizing graphics, world size, or narrative over gameplay… etc.
Nowadays, I feel as if every game tries to compete for “most game” while lacking cohesion and polished ideas.
And to top it off: non-optimized game size. I’m sorry—I don’t care if your game is $2.99, I’m not downloading 80GBs just to try a game I may refund an hour later.
People are reading the headline and assuming they’re talking about older single-purchase games, but the article is actually referring to mostly MTX-driven games that get continuous updates.
And the data further shows, in Newzoo’s own words, that these 908 million “PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games.”
Remember that even things like Rocket League are about a decade old at this point, and games like LoL, Dota 2 and CS:GO are even older
Well. The nature of my backlog is like I wait for games to come down in price and by the time I get to them they’re 10 years old haha.
I also have a habit of playing through the entire series before playing the newest one. I’m currently playing Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion which is the 4th game from Japan in that series but the 2nd to be released in US, SO I’m playing through it even though I don’t like it and will beat the next two games to finally play Trails in the Sky which is the one I really probably should have started with.
I do that with all my games, like Doom Eternal looks cool and so does the upcoming Dark Ages, but I went back and played Doom 1 & 2. 64, then the updated remaster of Doom 1 & 2 when that came out, and now I’m working on Doom 3. I got one more whole Doom game before I even get to Eternal.
Why should I dump 60usd plus into a multiplayer focused game I’ll maybe get to play 4 hours a week during prime times that is going to shrivel up and die in 2 years time when the next big thing comes out?
Or I can play all these games enjoy, have passionate modding communities adding to the game for free on top of me picking the entire thing up for maybe 20usd on sale if not less.
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
6.4% were in League of Legends
6.2% were in Roblox
5.8% were in Dota 2
5.4% were in FortniteThat is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don’t have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Free means you can easily get any friends to dip in and play which is a big factor.
Hmm. That’s a thought. I guess that that’d mesh with them also all being multiplayer.
Also big up for Cataclysm: DDA. One of the greatest games ever made.
It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it’s very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.
That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!
Free means a hell of a lot when you are a child with approximately $0 in expendable income.
I’m old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.
But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.
3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)
CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had “early access” packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.
Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p
Soo… What I’m getting is that you kinda like a game called Catapult: Streets Ahead?
Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It’s rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that’s 9 cents an hour, and I’m still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!
Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you’ve pretty much got it figured out.
I’m playing Counter-Strike 2
… exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod
… that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago
besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.
My personal hypothesis is that everyone likes online multiplayer initially because it’s pretty cool, then you get bored it when you realise playing with angry randos is no fun. It’s not that a younger generation prefers online multiplayer, it’s that they haven’t got sick of it yet!
I read every one of those and thought. Well that’s a new game. Apparently I’m old.
Apparently I’m old.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
League of legends is two decades old now, so if you’re thinking it’s new, yeah that’s on you 😜
I’m going to be honest I just looked up the game for the first time and had no clue it came out in 2009. I hadn’t ever heard of it until a few years ago so I just figured it was some new game. The whole warcraft/dota thing was crazy to me.
Crazy how?
I just learned that DOTA was a wc3 mod originally like last month, so I’m assuming that’s what they mean?
Edit: and how did I find out? Well, Basshunter’s “DOTA” music video of course. Which coincidentally I also learned was about DOTA the game lol.
Nope. I know about DOTA and how it has a bunch of spin offs. One of my best friends plays some weird betting game that is a mod of DOTA and he tried to explain the whole thing to me a long time ago.
@tacofox @AwesomeLowlander wasnt LoL made by some of the original DotA modders? But somehow valve ended up with the rights for the name so they made DotA 2 as a standalone game? It’s been ages since iv’e seen an article about the origins of those games :D
Sounds very valve-ish. But my knowledge ends at Basshunter 😅
There were many people who worked on dota back then. There was no official version to begin with, you could find a dozen variants in bnet on any given day. Slowly it got centralised. Some of the modders ended up at LoL, others ended up at Valve. The name wasn’t copyrighted, nobody really owned it. Valve kinda inherited it by virtue of hiring the guy running the mod team at the end.
So looking it up my guess is I played AoE over Warcraft, never understood DOTA, don’t really like battle area games, and have only ever watched AoE in e-Sports.
The amount of times I “finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I’ve been putting off” and it’s 7 years old. My kid is into “newer Disney stories” I don’t know from my day… that are 25 year old films!
I don’t get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
People don’t get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
The game may be old but that doesn’t mean a particular person has played it before.
There are good new games, but i cannot afford to pay for them. Especially when I blow through them in a couple of weeks/days.
Which is why I pirate them as a lot of new games lack quality content, are often buggy, and riddled with dlc/micro transactions. Why risk my money on a buggy undeveloped game when I can ‘test’ them for free, at times I have gone back and paid for a game I really enjoyed… but that is super rare.
Plus GPUs are overpriced, especially with AI taking over as it is, the price is just going to go up.
Why bother with all of that when I can just boot up Factorio again. Additionally mods really make old games feel fresh again… And they are free.
My principle is “One euro, for one hour”.
Does the game cost 40e? Am I unsure whether I’d enjoy the game for 40 hours? I’ll get it for free first. Does it stick for that 40 hours or more, or will I get sure enough while playing to play that 40 hours at least? OK, take my money. No? It gets forgotten in my folder, and probably deleted later.
I’m still playing Skyrim.
I was playing a bunch of Skyrim with mods last year! Awesome game.
Most new AAA games suck, that’s why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
Now they’re made with marketable ‘passion’, ‘dedication’, and a team with ‘a family atmosphere’. My personal favorite ‘respect for the lore and previous games in the series’ definitely never has made a triple A game worse for wear.
Disingenuous buzzwords with no objective meaning behind them are my favorite things to hear in a game. It tells me to steer clear as far away as I possibly can. Which is a shame because I’d like to be excited about vampire: the masquerade 2.
Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.
The industry is deeply misguided.
It feels like it’s always been this way. The amount of ‘doom clones’ from the way back times are not to be forgotten.
It has, and its not just games though. Clothes, cars, movies, anime, even food all have trends. There are those that innovate, and those that imitate.
I bet a small portion of them don’t buy GPU every gen or ever other. 1080 Ti strong.
1070 gang for me
I have hundreds of games on steam.
I mostly play minecraft.
My games library is so huge, and I suffer from choice paralysis all the time.
You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I’ve used it before when I can’t pick what to play. You can apply filters too.
⭐w⭐ Thanks!
Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.
I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I’ll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft… Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won’t touch minecraft.
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I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
I die too fast in Noita to get too deep into it… I liked what I played of it though. Something about Starbound made it feel like Temu Terraria… I can’t put my finger on why it feels so … fake? Like physics or the way the player model moves and interacts with blocks is off or something. Maybe it is just too close to Terraria and the many hours I spent in Terraria makes anything close feel off.
This 100%. I looooove Noita and any deep systems-driven games where players explore, discover, and create content for years.
One of my favourite things is the sudden discovery that a game is much bigger and more open-ended than I thought. Especially when it happens dozens of hours in.
I’ve been playing a lot of terraria with my son recently, it’s been a lot of fun going back to it. Coincidentally, I just saw the trailer for Noita for the first time last night, and thought “woah, that looks cool as hell…”
Have you looked at mods? I’m sure I saw an auomation mod for Terraria a while back.
Same might be true for starbound. But I don’t know much about its mods.
