PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
I see tf2, i click
I can wait till a game is $5. I've got so many to enjoy already.
Darktide, you're worth $5. Admit it. Release a dlc pack with new maps gamemodes characters classes whatever if you want more money. But the base game is worth $5.
I wanna shoot the heavy bolter at shit. The sounds for the gun sound so satisfyingly chunky. Slap that hunk of metal in the emperor's name. Hell yeah
See you in 2-3 years
@tonytins 6 years is old now? :< couldnt care less about the competitive/pvp stuff but im playing x4 foundations most of the time currently and some genres dont get that many new entries anyway, like open world action games like gta5. Thats from 2013 and most other titles like mafia 3 or just cause 4 arent much newer either
I hear ya'. Technology (including games) progressed so rapidly that I feel older than I honestly should.
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
Factorio considered older?
Probably? I have memories from over a decade back so
DLC is new..
So much more room to grow in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE
Because we have a giant backlog of steam sales.
Most new AAA games suck, that's why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
& Indie games
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.
What's your opinion on Dome Keeper?
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.
This would be a great time to promote !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
I'm not patient, I'm just broke.
JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol
!newcommunities@lemmy.world 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
That reminds me— I gotta do another Fallout: New Vegas run.
I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like "games are a waste of time". But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.
Also I've been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it's still fun
I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.
if you mean i do spend my time playing nes and snes via emulator, you are right
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.
I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games...
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)
What about new games, like world of warcraft.
11.35% of the human population.
It's wild how good the cheap games are these days. I'm 30 hours into playing Noita, have hundreds of hours in Vampire Survivor.
And I got about 15 hours into Dragon Age: Veilguard before it occurred to me I could crack open the Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition and actually have an enjoyable experience.
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are "six or more years old", and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I'm playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
For me, definitely older and indie (old and new). I don't get a lot of time these days to sit at my PC. Using my steam deck primarily these days is part of the reason I'm playing older games, but seriously I have a problem with steam/gog/name a storefront/ backlogs. I have so many games already, great time to review what I bought because of hype but never played.
Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don't have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money to buy them.
Where my Civ 6 people at?! Wooo!
I saw a stat on Civ VI steam page today that 45 000 people were playing it at that moment. That counts for something!
Civ4 is the best Civ.
UnCiv yo
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I just didn't like games/am depressed/games are getting BETTER, actually.
Games as a whole are getting better, but AAA is getting worse.
Indies are so good right now, and most without crazy DRM!
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It's kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
In general, I'd agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you'll find something great.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
I have a large backlog of five(?)+ plus year old games that are really good and I have yet to play. I'd much rather burn through those enjoying them on high settings instead of playing current games on low settings while trying to dodge crap monetization.
launches Baldur's Gate.exe ♪♫ "Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick led the way. Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick ran away." ♪♫
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.
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?
Never played it, but this type of game is up my alley. For what it's worth:
Yep.. lol I spend an embarrassing amount of time playing EverQuest 1 emulation servers.
EQ emu's ftw!
Quarm? THJ?
THJ right now!! I've been playing on emu servers for so long. I've played on almost all of them.
World of Warcraft.
92% of my playtime is Minecraft, makes sense.
I have been playing Galaga regularly since 1981. Still play it at least once a week.
While I agree that some of the reasons are because of industry direction and affordability. I do have to mention also that it could also be because of nostalgia, familiarity, simplicity and people still chipping at their library.
Me a fraction of a fraction of the gamer community playing only recent PCVR games and also Noita.
Any recs for person who enjoyed HL Alyx (+ community mapsets) and Ancient Dungeon VR?
If you like roguelikes like ancient dungeon i would highly suggest until you fall and for a more story based game if you haven't played lone echo 1 and 2 you're in for a treat.
New games are steaming piles of shit most of the time nowadays.
900 million population is more than enough.
(And that much better if they are all gamers :))