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 Fortnite
That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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!
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:
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.
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’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.
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.
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
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.
Does “older games” only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft… all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it’s a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn’t paint a clear picture or tell any story except “live service games work”
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.
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90’s. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn’t even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add “color” along the way, but they don’t fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I’ve developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so… it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn’t execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore… and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3’s happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ “jail breaking”. Modern games have this expectation that we “know” everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often “find out” about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev’s patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens… well… thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda… empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you’ve pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I’ve got a damn vampire and they aren’t weak during the day and OP af at night?
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
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.
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.
[email protected] is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it.
Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs.
I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light.
Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it’s not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
Black ops 6 is so bad IMHO. It takes forever to boot up the game and then hits you with the “update available, quit & restart”. Then waiting another 5 mins to download the update, then another couple mins to reach the main menu again. Oh and what was the actual update? To hit me with an advertisement video of season whatever…with new purchases for dumb costumes etc. Like c’mon just let me play the damn game already! When Im finally in a match the gameplay feels rigged…like I’m playing slots in Vegas than an actual video game. The respawns appearing out of nowhere. I honestly believe what I’m seeing on my screen is not what the other player is seeing. Its like these game designers purposely made this game based on an algorithm rather than setting game rules and allowing the players to compete based on skill. Maybe I’m way off on this (and am just a terrible cod player lol) but would like to hear other people’s opinion on this.
all the advertisements, constantly wanting me to spend more money when the game was already expensive to begin with. The game play as described as above. Also the perks/tiers suck. Makes for a very unenjoyable experience. The game is just not fun.
I will say, the zombies mode is the best version in many years. For the low price of $0 through gamepass (which I get for free through an MS Rewards farming script), I can’t complain too much about it. But I wish they would just release a standalone zombies game at some point, it’s literally the only thing I like about cod and would gladly actually buy it (assuming it isn’t ass, which is like 50/50 with cod lol).
I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.
We’re at Black Ops 6 already? They made 6 of them? Are there other Call of Duty games as well since? I think the last I played was Infinite Warfare, I think I have WWII in my library unplayed.
Funny enough, black ops 2, a game from 2012, is still listed at full price at $60—or $100 if you want the DLC—online. On the other hand, the current black ops 6 only costs $70 and new content is free. Admittedly, 2 was a far better game in just about every regard from what I know. But the fact that a modern game is $30 cheaper than a 12 year old game is fucking insane. Activision is so bad with this shit.
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style>
BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction. >
I totally agree with you. Another good example is Alice: Madness Returns. Just booted it up for the first time yesterday and it looks so good, pleasing in a way.
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?!
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/
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
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.
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.
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
I don’t even know what the newest game I even own is… Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it’s DLC, I haven’t bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I’m going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
Based on the size of the company and the budget for the game I’d at least call it a AA game. My real point is I paid full price for it and have absolutely no regrets.
I’m playing Fallout 4 right now. It’s not the only game I play by any means. Too many new games are overly focused on graphics or monetization. I’m always trying new games and the better ones often don’t have the best graphics. We want 2010 gameplay. Hell, I’ll still play Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition, but older games usually need resolution and texture upgrade mods. Fortunately a lot of great old games actually get them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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.
I read every one of those and thought. Well that’s a new game. 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/
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
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!
25 years so… Tarzan? Lilo and Stitch? The Emperor’s New Groove?
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?
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.
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
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.
Sounds very valve-ish. But my knowledge ends at Basshunter 😅
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
Does “older games” only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft… all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it’s a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn’t paint a clear picture or tell any story except “live service games work”
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.
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.
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90’s. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn’t even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
That’s a high bar to clear, but if you add it to the GOG Dreamlist, I’ll vote for it.
It’s already on there
Thanks. I gave it a search before asking, and I didn’t see it, but with the link you posted elsewhere, I just voted on it.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realmz
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Same. I also definitely played City of Bywater, and I know I had both Assault on Giant Mountain and Castle in The Clouds (this one was giants right?)
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/realmz-bce
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
Yeah I downloaded it while we were chatting. I’m going to try and get it running after work.
Hah! That’s some hardcore effort to make that game multiplayer!
I mean, there were a bunch of RPGs in roughly that genre out in those years; IMHO, Realmz and the Exile series were the best out on the Mac.
goes poking around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasoft
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
I got that bundle at 92% off and it took me 2 years to finish. It was awesome
Never played it, but this type of game is up my alley. For what it’s worth:
https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/realmz-1994
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add “color” along the way, but they don’t fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I’ve developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so… it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn’t execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore… and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3’s happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ “jail breaking”. Modern games have this expectation that we “know” everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often “find out” about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev’s patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens… well… thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda… empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you’ve pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I’ve got a damn vampire and they aren’t weak during the day and OP af at night?
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
That reminds me— I gotta do another Fallout: New Vegas run.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
Yes, actually that was my intended next run! I just gotta remember how to set up everything.
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.
This would be a great time to promote [email protected]
JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol
[email protected] is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
I’m not patient, I’m just broke.
It forces you to be patient. You fit the bill
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
[email protected] might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it’s not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
Black ops 6 is so bad IMHO. It takes forever to boot up the game and then hits you with the “update available, quit & restart”. Then waiting another 5 mins to download the update, then another couple mins to reach the main menu again. Oh and what was the actual update? To hit me with an advertisement video of season whatever…with new purchases for dumb costumes etc. Like c’mon just let me play the damn game already! When Im finally in a match the gameplay feels rigged…like I’m playing slots in Vegas than an actual video game. The respawns appearing out of nowhere. I honestly believe what I’m seeing on my screen is not what the other player is seeing. Its like these game designers purposely made this game based on an algorithm rather than setting game rules and allowing the players to compete based on skill. Maybe I’m way off on this (and am just a terrible cod player lol) but would like to hear other people’s opinion on this.
all the advertisements, constantly wanting me to spend more money when the game was already expensive to begin with. The game play as described as above. Also the perks/tiers suck. Makes for a very unenjoyable experience. The game is just not fun.
I will say, the zombies mode is the best version in many years. For the low price of $0 through gamepass (which I get for free through an MS Rewards farming script), I can’t complain too much about it. But I wish they would just release a standalone zombies game at some point, it’s literally the only thing I like about cod and would gladly actually buy it (assuming it isn’t ass, which is like 50/50 with cod lol).
I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.
We’re at Black Ops 6 already? They made 6 of them? Are there other Call of Duty games as well since? I think the last I played was Infinite Warfare, I think I have WWII in my library unplayed.
I kinda lost track of the AAA treadmill.
Funny enough, black ops 2, a game from 2012, is still listed at full price at $60—or $100 if you want the DLC—online. On the other hand, the current black ops 6 only costs $70 and new content is free. Admittedly, 2 was a far better game in just about every regard from what I know. But the fact that a modern game is $30 cheaper than a 12 year old game is fucking insane. Activision is so bad with this shit.
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
I totally agree with you. Another good example is Alice: Madness Returns. Just booted it up for the first time yesterday and it looks so good, pleasing in a way.
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/
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.
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?!
No, not really, you can start staking with as many as you want, see pooled staking: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/pools/
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/
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
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.
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.
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
I don’t even know what the newest game I even own is… Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it’s DLC, I haven’t bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I’m going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
BG3 isn’t an AAA title. Larian is an indie studio.
Based on the size of the company and the budget for the game I’d at least call it a AA game. My real point is I paid full price for it and have absolutely no regrets.
Huh, I thought of them as AA. I get indie means independent which they are, but they’re a studio with multiple successful releases even before bg3.
Yeah, I’ve lost track myself. I just follow feeds that alert of me free deals.
I actually learned that I can’t even sort my Steam library by release date because of this thread. Otherwise I would actually know lol
I’m playing Fallout 4 right now. It’s not the only game I play by any means. Too many new games are overly focused on graphics or monetization. I’m always trying new games and the better ones often don’t have the best graphics. We want 2010 gameplay. Hell, I’ll still play Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition, but older games usually need resolution and texture upgrade mods. Fortunately a lot of great old games actually get them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
11.35% of the human population.