The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
What's different is that new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy. The game won't function unless it can phone home, stream assets etc. from their server, and they can and do plan to shut that server off at some point, forcing you to move on and buy new games.
Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think Netflix and the streaming industry in general aspires to convert movies into a planned obsolescence business model; in the beginning Netflix's selling point was that they had an archive of every DVD ever made, but now increasingly they're conditioning us to expect that stuff's going to leave the platform sooner or later. Why? If all we watch are the classics there's not much point to keep subscribing to a streaming service, just download/buy the classics, and then you're done. They are having trouble with this however because the movies they put out just aren't as good as the older stuff; I've read the data indicates that people are mostly watching 90s stuff on Netflix, so they can't purge it from the platform just yet. But they will try.
The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel. They switched to a planned obsolescence model one day and we just went along with it.
csense · 31d ago
If you care about this, vote with your wallet. If you don't like a game's phone-home or planned-obsolescence "features," don't buy it (or wait for a deal and don't pay full price).
I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.
Capricorn2481 · 31d ago
> If you care about this, vote with your wallet
Much of the gaming population are not following this stuff as closely, and get burned once or twice before they realize what's happening. I think it's good to pressure companies ahead of time, and vote with your wallet when you can.
bisby · 30d ago
Much of the gaming population doesn't replay games. Why should I care if Major Game doesn't work any more, I've been playing Major Game 2. I had no intention of playing Major Game 1 again. The fact that their old game doesn't work anymore doesn't "burn" them, and they genuinely might not even notice. As long as they keep the game servers up and running long enough for the vast majority of people to get their enjoyment out of the game, no one feels robbed, and no one stops buying games as a result. The average person is not that savvy of a consumer.
Can I play CoD4 on xbox 360 anymore? Single AND multiplayer? I genuinely don't know the answer to that because I haven't tried within the past decade(+). Should I be able to? Absolutely yes. But I have a sneaking suspicion all the multiplayer servers are shut down.
lesuorac · 31d ago
> If you care about this, vote with your wallet.
While I'm not going to say you can't vote with your wallet.
You can also just vote with a vote ... Companies group up together all the time to create trade unions to advance legislation in their favor. There's nothing wrong with individuals grouping together for a non-commercial interest.
pasta67 · 31d ago
Frankly, there is not much difference - gog is already part of the problem.
veunes · 31d ago
With games, it's even worse because once the servers are gone, the whole thing can literally stop functioning. At least with movies you can still rip a Blu-ray or buy a DVD. And it's not just about making money anymore, it's about shaping consumer habits so we accept losing access as the default.
sidewndr46 · 31d ago
Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord
DrillShopper · 31d ago
Live service shooters usually have a very short lifespan unless they can displace Overwatch, Valorent, Fortnite, or Destiny
Even Halo (Infinite) couldn't manage it
Stop buying this kind of game if you are expecting game preservation from one of the worst studios running.
No comments yet
const_cast · 31d ago
Concord was dead even at the conceptual stage. The problem is these big AAA studios are always chasing the hottest new thing, never innovating for themselves.
It's the same problem with movies. They're so unbelievably expensive that nobody will dare pay for something that isn't already proven. But if you do something that's proven, there's a good chance it's just gonna come up second best. Worst case scenario, it comes out as uninspired slop, destined for the bargain bin, like Concord.
pasta67 · 31d ago
The article is not radiating original narrative and some mistakes can be made, but it is missing very big issue that modern game developers are able to solve with live games. All the old games became popular because they were heavily pirated. Sometimes that was the only reason. Up till 2010s I only played pirated games - even when they were on steam. The only reason why some of those games are in my steam/gog account now is because I had played those games as pirated copies. Not all of them were good games, though, but at least I can launch them and try again.
parineum · 31d ago
Those games are the paper plates of the industry. Disposable crap not meant to last. They're rarely good in the first place because that same mindset leads to bad decisions for gameplay too.
RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.
southernplaces7 · 31d ago
>The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel
A barrel entirely of your own creation. Just don't buy their games and done. I've never subscribed to a game in my life and never gave a shit about the difference. Anyone at all can do this. You describe these games as if they were some vital service like email or cloud storage (and even those have solutions against companies that become abusive).
pphysch · 31d ago
Final Fantasy was on release #11 by the time Steam was initially released in 2003.
Tiktaalik · 31d ago
> new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy
It's not this. It's simply that the level of quality and features and competition in modern games is so insanely high that developer time is devoted to other things and custom servers and modding is relatively niche and doesn't move the quality needle enough.
Time is limited and focusing on custom servers means less time spent elsewhere.
CrossVR · 32d ago
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Gigachad · 32d ago
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
somenameforme · 32d ago
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
You are proving GP and OP’s point. CS 1.6 was an exceptionally popular game in the GoldSrc days and that is why it survived and was chosen by you as an example. That is an exception not the norm. Plenty of FPSs from the same generation have been forgotten. How many people out there are still playing Day of Defeat? Or Counter Strike Condition Zero? Or any of the old Delta Force games? Or Daikatana (except for the lol factor?)
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
dragontamer · 31d ago
I think the Starseige Tribes community is still active. They have DOZENS of people, dozens!!
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
---------
The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
somenameforme · 31d ago
There were also lots of exceptionally popular games that didn't survive simply because subsequent games were simply better. One example there would be Street Fighter 2. So the difference is that I'm arguing that games have staying power based on their overall quality, not their quality for a given era. When they're reasonably objectively surpassed, they tend to die off. If they doesn't happen, they tend to stick around.
This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.
Hikikomori · 31d ago
Bit weird to compare a singleplayer game with little replayability to the genre defining multiplayer game of its time and try drawing conclusions from that.
somenameforme · 31d ago
Doom was the genre defining multiplayer game, and it released in 1993. And there were a ton of multiplayer shooters released in the 7 years interim. The only really distinct thing about Counter-Strike, besides its quality, is that it came to Steam from the very beginning. But the game had already become a classic before 1.6 launched on Steam and the idea of playing on/through Steam at the time was quite divisive.
TulliusCicero · 31d ago
Counterstrike was the defining game for a subgenre of tactical shooters, of which you can see that Valorant is a member.
pasta67 · 31d ago
CS was 3D shooter and not a DOS game - quite important distinction as it gave better(and nonpixelating) graphic. Pre 1.6 CS had many modifications already - frankly I stopped playing CS before 1.6 and had my fun.
tremon · 30d ago
Descent and Quake were both 3D shooters and DOS games, and Halo came out a year earlier with "better graphics"; CS was neither the first 3D shooter nor the first Windows game in its genre. Also, the first Counter-Strike was not a completely new game -- it used a modified Half-Life engine (which itself was built on the Quake engine).
Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.
Hikikomori · 31d ago
"of its time"
29athrowaway · 31d ago
The main difference with the newer version is better graphics, but that comes at the expense of minimum specs, loading time, etc.
jfengel · 31d ago
Isn't Hogwarts Legacy famously just not a good game?
On top of which, the author of the IP has increasingly aggravated a significant segment of their fan base.
bombcar · 31d ago
It was extremely popular - for about as long as it took to beat the story. It has no multiplayer.
It’s entirely unfair to expect it to continue to pull numbers similar to a dedicated multiplayer game.
Very few single-player story games have much replayability, though they do exist (usually rogue likes or heavily moddable).
ta12653421 · 32d ago
Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without install etc.
shakna · 31d ago
There's quite a few ports to the browser running around, though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.
armada651 · 31d ago
Yet if you gather up a group of friends you can still play these old obscure multiplayer games because it didn't rely purely on the master servers being maintained forever.
No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.
fzeroracer · 31d ago
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
RyJones · 31d ago
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
sodality2 · 32d ago
Older DRM is more commonly cracked because there’s more time to crack it. Though the arms race has grown way more sophisticated from the supply side
Discordian93 · 32d ago
You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube anymore.
Firehawke · 31d ago
Completely wrong.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc.
You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work.
https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
buran77 · 31d ago
> make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
LegionMammal978 · 31d ago
> You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.
And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
cout · 31d ago
This is a good point. I'm still looking for a good way for my kids to play mindrover on windows 11, and I haven't found one.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 31d ago
Very old games are a problem for windows and have a significant higher chance of running out of the box with proton on linux
sitzkrieg · 31d ago
can you provide an example?
ThatMedicIsASpy · 30d ago
Every time people tried to make 20-30 year old games work I quickly test them on my Linux machines if they are available on the internet archive and so far they have worked out of the box every time. The last one was a German point and click game from ~28 years ago.
Adding them to steam and forcing proton is also simpler than something like bottles for me.
People try to run them on W10/11 and they won't start, the windows compatibility layer hardly gets them up and running.
HideousKojima · 31d ago
The 2008 Prince of Persia is easier to get running through Proton than on Windows. For the Windows Steam release you have to disable the Steam overlay and some other tweaks to get it working
bombcar · 31d ago
I think he means that trying to run some early win16 games will fail on windows, but run fine in emulation/wine, etc.
But of course, you can run dosbox on windows, too.
squigz · 31d ago
It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have.
This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons:
- It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save? TOO BAD. Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
- And the flipside of that: that paying for live service games, you get consistent updates, new content, new cosmetics, etc, etc. You also get features like cloud saves. You don't have to worry about managing 100s of CDs or worry about a scratch on them or anything like that.
Is there a problem these days with online-only games being shut down? Yes, absolutely, and I hope the industry moves away from that.
Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
armada651 · 31d ago
> It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have.
Not every game released today is a live service game and I'm pretty sure people would have had the same objections back in those days.
> Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
People advocating for video game preservation aren't advocating we all go back to CD-ROM. Video game preservation can be done digitally perfectly fine.
What people are advocating for is that games are designed to remain at least functional once the company doesn't deem it financially viable to provide services for that game anymore.
HideousKojima · 31d ago
A game doesn't need to be live service to support cloud saves, though. There are completely DRM free games on Steam that support cloud saves. And PC games that released on discs back in the day still could get updates.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
Sleaker · 31d ago
> Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
Not folk remedies, you can take it to a game store and most have the equipment to resurface the CD.
mcnamaratw · 31d ago
Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD version?
nilamo · 31d ago
All of us who never hooked the dreamcast up to the internet.
Firehawke · 31d ago
Dreamcast didn't have game patches over the internet. That wasn't a thing until the Xbox. You could, in rare occasions, download additional content (e.g. PSO had downloadable quests) but the vast majority of games were standalone.
anthk · 31d ago
We downloaded patches or get them as an extra with PC gaming magazines just fine. On CD's... everyone backed up them at ISO's and mounted them with dedicated software.
fendy3002 · 32d ago
beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.
foxglacier · 32d ago
The unit being a $20 CD-ROM drive? Losing the disk would be a bigger problem than damaging the drive.
johnwalkr · 31d ago
If you want to ply on original hardware, which people that use original cds typically do, the drive might be valuable or hard to replace depending on the system.
imhoguy · 32d ago
At that point I think the game is available as ROM file or at least the owner of rare one should make such.
jbverschoor · 31d ago
MSX/C64 era: games are smaller than your average png icon
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days
bitwize · 32d ago
One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?!
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
platevoltage · 32d ago
Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
spacechild1 · 32d ago
I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.
> This comment on society is driven home (or in fact, not driven at all) even further by the computer AI. It doesn't even leave the starting gate. Much like the dreams and aspirations we harbour as youth, reving our engines on a starting line where the crack of the pistol never comes. Meanwhile, those of privledge cruise to easy victory, unconcerned over such mundane things as rent or grocery bills or collideable landscapes.
bitwize · 31d ago
I love how if you accelerate backwards long enough (in the BLJ of auto racing games), you will eventually be at a point in the coordinate system where the distance between adjacent floating-point numbers is large enough to be visible, leading to your truck's geometry beginning to "shimmer", and then warp and change shape in bizarre twisted ways.
Truly only a masterpiece could gift us with an experience like that.
Clearly y'all never played Clover 3D, which gave Mario 64 for run for it's money. I mean, Clover has at least one extra finger!
bitwize · 32d ago
Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
platevoltage · 31d ago
As someone who these days enjoys watching other people play bad games, or play good games wrong (speed running, or just making comedic content), I'm definitely not down to play that horrific garbage. I might go rewatch AVGN do it though.
nwallin · 31d ago
City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community servers have a license from the publisher.
gmuslera · 32d ago
I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games").
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
pasta67 · 31d ago
I was so looking for this type of comment.
There is no survivor bias, you [insert insult]!
So many of those games were really bad even at their time. BUT YOU CAN STILL PLAY THEM. I've tossed many games out of my catalogue and for some I wished they vanish from existence and they all have survived!
While article is recycling narrative - it has a reason, but your recycled opinion is not only wrong but has no reason other than lowkey nitpick article.
gmuslera · 31d ago
Oh, but there are "surviving" games, as they are still popular, and remixed, and emulated, and things like that. You have a Doom, a Tetris, Pacmans, Marios, even you have new editions of the series of the Monkey Island. That is one way to see surviving, still present, played, and with enough exposure in the media to still have a decent enough player base. And then you have curiosity items that may be in big bags of old games that are tried, discarded, but they are essentially forgotten.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
secstate · 32d ago
I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.
No comments yet
jmyeet · 32d ago
You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
tzs · 32d ago
People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons.
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
tumsfestival · 31d ago
>The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.
Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...
Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.
pasta67 · 31d ago
I can't seriously regard Skyrim as RPG - it is simulation of RPG - visually pleasing, but no challenging enough. Too much loot in Bethesda games is really killing RPG vibe for me.
Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.
I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.
tstrimple · 31d ago
Expedition 33 had a huge launch and was a fantastic RPG experience. Far better to my tastes than games like Oblivion or Skyrim.
tpxl · 32d ago
On the other hand, Overwatch 1 is dead because Blizzard said so.
wiseowise · 32d ago
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
jmyeet · 31d ago
I thought WC3 was 1990s but I went an checked: 2002. Weird. I so associate Warcraft (excluding WoW) with the 1990s.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
zx10rse · 31d ago
I don't think it is a generational thing or a lindy effect plain, and simple greed is what is killing modern day games.
Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc.
There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
MattRix · 31d ago
The idea that there’s nothing to these games just isn’t true. Take Fortnite, the quintessential “modern game” that popularized battle passes.
You don’t need a battle pass to play, in fact all purchasable things are purely cosmetic: they offer no gameplay value. Nobody is playing Fortnite for the cosmetics, they’re playing it because it’s fun! Why would you care about cosmetics in a game you don’t enjoy playing? It makes no sense.
“no depth”: patently false. Fortnite is one of the highest skill ceiling games around.
“no cool mechanics”: there are tons of cool mechanics, both at a gameplay level and meta level, with more being cycled in every season.
“no story”: admittedly the story is a bit opaque, but the community loves the big story events that happen every season.
“no easter eggs or secrets”: Sure there are! Each new season is filled with them, and there are entire wikis dedicated to cataloguing them.
blueboo · 31d ago
Fortnite‘s dark design was the reason Epic was subject of the largest FTC gaming-related fine in history. $200m+
MattRix · 31d ago
That wasn’t because of the dark design of Fortnite itself, it was mostly because their shop allowed users (including children) to make purchases with only a single click, without any confirmation, leading to a lot of accidental purchases. Definitely not a good thing, but also not indicative of some fundamental issue with the game’s overall design. They added confirmation and the ability to undo purchases over 5 years ago.
pasta67 · 31d ago
You clearly have a different understanding for meaning of the words and what is meant by them.
Look, there is no depth in Fortnite, just like there is no deepness in minds of kids that are under 10 and playing it.
Same for other points. Fortnite is arcade shooter - no one is expecting from it realistic mechanics, which would also ruin the game. Fortnite is a niche and it was kids game - some of them have grown up and moved on.
MattRix · 30d ago
Give me an example or definition of what you mean by depth, and we can see if it fulfills it.
The tone of your post makes me think you’ve fallen into the logical trap of believing that because a game is enjoyed by children, that it can’t be also enjoyed by older people as well. See also: Minecraft.
A true sign of maturity is being able to enjoy a game on its actual merits, and not worrying about whether you’re playing a “kids’ game”.
1oooqooq · 31d ago
it's well know the hit box for "the defaults" (slang to refer to players with free character designs) are slightly larger.
but yeah, it's by far the least egregious case indeed.
guilamu · 31d ago
No, this is just plain wrong. The hitbox is the same one on all skins. On payed skin like peely for example, the skin is bigger and will be more visible, but the hitbox stay the same. This is pay to loose if anything.
Do you really consider "esports.net" a source for the internal implementation details of a proprietary video game?
guilamu · 31d ago
I consider it better than 0 source at all. I also have access to the decrypted assets of the game and can personally confirm but the value of that is nil since I can't bring proof.
I'm pretty sure you could find dozens of sources confirming that too, but I don't have the time atm.
(only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit box)
duckmysick · 31d ago
There are indie games without those in-app purchases that capture the spirit of the old games.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 31d ago
Yes, these games are definitely out there. Makes me want to go through my Steam library; I’m sure I could list off dozens of games but I’ll just stick with one great example that comes to mind: Axiom Verge.
makeitdouble · 31d ago
Is it your opinion of a game like Breath of the wild ?
Not so great games have existed as long as games existed. Parent's point is that the few good ones stay. And could imagine someone in 20 years replaying BOTW, or This war of Mine, same way Journey still has many active players 13 years later.
zx10rse · 31d ago
The article touches on multiplayer games which my comment reflected, they are after all the predominant genre that generates the most profit for companies, and of course are the most exploited.
I didn't say that there are no good new games anymore, there are of course good titles great games your example is one, but the market shifted because the cash is elsewhere.
If you compare the profit for a game like BOTW despite being huge success by unit sales, and the yearly profit of a game like Fortnite as some of the commenters pointed, or CoD you will see what I mean, those tittles literally print money with in game shops not unit sales.
I agree with you, and this was my main point in 20 years someone will replay BOTW because it is a great game, the ones that are made to simply print money will be replaced by others that prints money faster, and better.
plandis · 31d ago
> There is simply nothing to it
If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.
> no depth
If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.
> no cool mechanics
Subjective but I disagree.
> no story nothing
Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.
> and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
Capricorn2481 · 31d ago
> people still find value in that even if it’s destructive
I am probably in the 98th percentile of time playing video games, and have a lot of friends that play. I really don't disagree with most of your post, but this sentence grabbed me. A person "finding value" in something destructive is not a "different strokes for different folks" situation.
It's more likely they are caught in a desperate situation, either from chasing money that will never materialize or some other kind of high. The cycle of gambling long term is horrible. It's an addictive and destructive pattern with no end in sight, and it ruins lives, and not just the life of the gambler.
While it's rare for a similarly extreme situation to happen with online games, it's less about losing all of your money and more about losing all of your time. It's not uncommon for people to play these games more compulsively than anything, while having 0 fun. Some are self-aware enough to wish they weren't playing it altogether, while being unable to stop. And I realize this can come off condescending, but some people are unaware that they aren't having fun and are sad at the end of the day, unable to confront why. It would not be wise to fault the people themselves with this behavior. There are games designed to foster this compulsion.
I don't think this is unique to online games. There are certainly single-player games that can impart the same feelings. But there are bad design decisions that are more common to online games that are meant to create addiction. Take daily quests: Where they are present, they are the only decent way to progress in a game. They fucking suck, are universally hated, but people still play everyday, even if they don't feel like it. The game can obviously be balanced to provide better general progression and omit daily quests, which would let people play when they feel like it. But designers choose not to do this, because research shows people play more when they login every day. And the longer people are playing, the more likely they can be monetized.
And that's an inherent issue with recent online games that build a revenue model on micro transactions: They are trying to make you play as long as possible to maximize conversion. That's not a healthy relationship with a customer. These games are distinct from Chess, not because they lack depth or mechanics, but because they are fine-tuned to make you chase the next thing, forever. Many people recognize this, don't enjoy it, and can't stop. The same way many kids are hyper aware of their addiction to scrolling, but continue to scroll.
So yes, people play these games, but that doesn't mean they have value even to the player. They just have the bells and whistles to keep people hooked. For my own part, it's a constant battle to be aware of when I'm having fun and when I'm getting sucked into something unhealthy.
TulliusCicero · 31d ago
> There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing
I see we've reached "grumpy old man yelling at cloud" levels of rhetoric.
Sure, there's predatory micro transactions, but there's absolutely also neat new content and mechanics added to games like Dota or Fortnite. Dota just recently got a couple of fuck off huge patches that I saw the notes for (I don't play it myself but occasionally see things mentioned in the Deadlock community).
strken · 32d ago
If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?"
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
xboxnolifes · 32d ago
Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.
jghn · 32d ago
Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1]
At the same time you still see projects like Beating Every N64 Game [0], so there's evidence that there's still interest even in the absolute worst games on the old consoles.
you're forgetting that modern games REQUIRE company releasing them to host a server, and there are no ways to host a community one. Some of them take enormous effort to create a fan server if it is even possible - as some games stream assets serverside, and if that isn't captured in some way beforehand...
you can still play those old "bad" games, they still exist.
CivBase · 31d ago
This is simply wrong. Obscure and commercially unsuccessful games still work today, although it might be difficult to find the hardware needed to run them.
Even the successful games of today are likely to die eventually. Ubisoft's The Crew was relatively successful, but they shut down the servers and made the game unplayable. Now they're talking about at least adding an "offline mode" but core features of the game would still be unavailable to the customers who bought it.
The difference with games today is that many are designed to require a connection to company servers - and those servers cannot be self-hosted. Eventually it won't be profitable for the company to continue running those servers and they'll shut them down. Unless companies are forced to provide an EOL plan that allows customers to continue playing the games they bought (could be self-hosted servers, open source, patching out the server requirement, etc), modern games will continue to die at an increasing rate.
Barrin92 · 31d ago
>is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
thiht · 31d ago
There are plenty of games made in the last years that will be remembered 10 years from now. The Horizon series comes to mind.
Games need time to become classics, because we need time to realize how impactful they were and how much they live in our memories.
abenga · 31d ago
This just sounds like everyone remembering music/movies/other art that came out when we were coming of age extremely fondly. Young people starting to game now will remember a different set of games from you.
Barrin92 · 31d ago
It's intellectually lazy to attribute any judgement of media to nostalgia, and inappropriate in this case. Young people are the best example of this. If you look at what past games the current teenagers are interested in, it actually is games from the early console era. Even in game art it's evident. Great indie titles, see for example Animal Well or Celeste harken back to the pixelart era, nobody emulates ca 2009 3d realism. Because artistically it just looks uninspired.
There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium. This applies to film as well. The last fifteen years have largely been dreadful and nobody is going to remember dozens of conveyor belt produced Marvel slop films. People will still watch Coppola and Kubrick in 30 years.
And that's btw 20-30 years before I was born, you see my birthdate in my username. I don't appeal to "what I remember" when looking at media.
abenga · 31d ago
> There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium.
A few great movies are made in any period of history, along with a lot of commercial stuff along with B-D grade crap. Not all movies made in the last couple of movies are Marvel movies. It sounds like you picked great movies that were made in the past to watch when you were growing up, and those are the formative movies for you. It doesn't in any way negate what I said. It is still "what you remember".
phatfish · 31d ago
Minecraft birthed a genre and crossed into a full on cultural event. Boosted by YouTube let's play and live streaming also growing very fast at the time.
t-3 · 31d ago
There's also a big heaping helping of "many titles, same game". There's no reason to buy a new game when it's the same as the old game, but with half the functionality hidden in DLCs where the older title will have that from the start and likely be mod-friendly to boot.
komali2 · 31d ago
Certainly people talk the most about the best games of a given generation, but I recently loaded up a 3ds with basically the top 50 games for it, then another 30 or so DS generation games, and so on down through GBA, GBC, SNES, NES... hundreds and hundreds of games I'm enjoying way more than some of the most played games of this generation e.g. Call of Duty or Fortnite.
So not to be an old fart but I think previous generations really were spoiled by a much better on average library. Then again there are many phenomenal indie games coming out lately. Some of the best games, in my opinion, of the last 30 years, came out this decade: Outer Wilds and Animal Well, for example.
vitehozonage · 32d ago
Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty.
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
veunes · 31d ago
Having the same thought... The games we still play today weren't just "old," they were exceptional and had communities passionate enough to keep them alive
paulddraper · 32d ago
Also known as “survivorship bias” [1]
Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
veunes · 31d ago
The whole industry's sprinting toward short-term gains at the cost of legacy, and the result is a graveyard of great games barely a few years old.
tempodox · 32d ago
It's the same enshittification trajectory as everywhere else. It starts with a product that serves its users and once the money starts flowing in, users are turned into cattle to be milked and shorn.
chii · 32d ago
so apparently, these 'users' are so lacking in agency that they willingly get milked.
If so, they deserve it.
There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.
hulitu · 31d ago
> they willingly get milked.
> If so, they deserve it.
The majority of users have no idea that they are getting milked and their data end up in the hand of Ad companies and law enforcement.
komali2 · 31d ago
I think it's time we as a society let go of this 7,000 year old tendency to place all blame for people suffering from how a society is set up, on individuals. Don't you think we can find a way to do that without taking away people's agency?
For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore."
So, we've tried pinning it on individuals for a while, it's clearly not the right angle. What else might be? Could it be that the systems analysis is on the right track?
anonymars · 31d ago
100% agree - I usually use obesity as a simple example to make the point: "Our society became obese in a span of 50 years, how amazing that so many individuals lost their willpower!" Maybe there's a little more to it than that, eh?
Nasrudith · 31d ago
The reason why blaming individuals is so popular is because everything else is ultimately some degree of obfuscation. The most problematic part of bureaucracies of all sorts (be they government or corporate) is the ability to arrange a structure so that nobody is at fault.
Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of <X> who is capable of changing things for not doing so.".
komali2 · 31d ago
Your perspective makes sense from a sort of common sense angle, but I can't reconcile it with sociological studies.
Whose "fault" was it? If we had a quantum supercomputer and video from every angle I bet we could calculate the first person to panic and start running. Have we successfully de-obfuscated the situation and found our culprit? I'm not sure, after all, two people away was a person about to panic as well, in fact they would have in exactly 2 seconds after the first person if the first person hadn't... In fact everyone on the crowd was on edge and on the verge of panic, hence why the crush was able to happen at all. So in that sense it's not really obfuscation to do a systems analysis on crowd dynamics to figure out why the crush happened.
And now hold on, whether we want to blame the individual that kicked off the panic or everyone in the crowd for not keeping their cool, is it fair, reasonable, or accurate to assign blame? These people hopped on a train and went to a Halloween party - surely it's reasonable to expect that on such a day, crowd control measures would be in place to keep them safe. After all, society keeps them safe from other things they don't really need to worry about - separating cars and pedestrians, keeping the water clean, flushing away their poo. Isn't it reasonable for them to assume that roads would be designed wide enough to accommodate a lot of people? That there'd be multiple exits? If so, then it's the fault of the bar for not communicating the tight pedestrian situation, or doing crowd limiting. Er, well, not just one bar, but the 20 that are in that area. Also the chief of police for not setting up proper crowd control, and the traffic commissioner for not instructing the chief to do so. Or mayor. Actually maybe the city planner for allowing such narrow areas to develop into popular bar areas at all. No not the city planner in 2022, the one in 1985 when they were rebuilding that area after the war.
I think especially in the western world there's a habit, maybe borne of western hyper individualism, to always try to find the individualist angle. "Well maybe people should take more personal responsibility for their safety!" And if people want to live that way I think they should be allowed to. Far away. Remotely, on farms or something lol. For those of us that prefer living more dense lifestyles in societies, I think it makes a lot more sense to take a systems analysis approach to these kinds of problems with reasonable good faith baked in.
Often it's not obfuscation, often situations simply are complicated to where it's impossible to blame the individual without contorting into strange value systems.
pasta67 · 31d ago
There is nothing wrong on blaming individuals. The blame is not on what they are doing but what they are not doing and that is not becoming organized.
PS I for one do not blame anyone. If you enjoy something - that is not going to last forever.
pasta67 · 31d ago
I really disliked Quake when it came out. Aestetically it was not pleasing and graphically even step back to DOOM2 imo.
But there were players that had different views and played it... also probably they had shooter genre in higher priority while it was not on my top genre list - after racing, rpg and strategy games.
I know Command and Conquer 4 and Sim City (2013) both required server access at launch to run single player.
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
3abiton · 31d ago
That's why I love GoG. No bs, no drm, straight up good games.
Buttons840 · 32d ago
We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.)
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it.
Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
ijk · 32d ago
Copyright is pretty broken at this point; the drop to zero cost for duplicating bits broke a lot of assumptions 30-odd years ago and we've been slow walking the consequences ever since. AI kind of punched it in the gut, but it was already wobbling. There's been a bunch of attempts to patch things, but there's a significant shear between the common understanding of copyright law, the actual current caselaw, and what you can get away with as either an individual or a corporation. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better--a lot of people have a lot of money invested on things that are increasingly divorced from the economic and social forces at work--but I anticipate a realignment similar to the post printing-press era. (Which took decades for the consequences to ripple out, so we'll probably be at this a while if that's at all comparable.)
BlueTemplar · 32d ago
Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once - would help a lot.
unclad5968 · 32d ago
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
lesser23 · 32d ago
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation?
Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.
Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.
Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
izacus · 31d ago
It's proof enough about the damage IP law did to culture to see current major American cultural artifacts being 50 year old star wars and even older Marvel comics. That's what current teenager's grandfathers watched.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
Uvix · 32d ago
The grandparent specifically rejected letting the Mario IP enter the public domain. So whether or not it should, that's a completely different discussion from the one being held here.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
Buttons840 · 32d ago
I'm saying there's a middle ground--or could be, if the laws were changed--where companies can keep their IP, but reselling and rent-seeking on decades old creations wouldn't be possible.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
tiltowait · 32d ago
Is Mario art?
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
DecoySalamander · 32d ago
A different question to ask is why the public is obligated to enforce artist's rights in perpetuity? And don't forget that artworks don't just spawn from a single mind - they are buit upon existing, freely available art and general culture, which isn't a subject to special protection in the first place.
barnabee · 31d ago
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
whatnow37373 · 32d ago
I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.
Buttons840 · 31d ago
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
This will never be required. An artist is free to keep their art for themselves and never make a copy.
Once an artist has distributed a copy however, the question becomes, why aren't other people free to do things they are capable of doing, like making additional copies?
ndriscoll · 32d ago
Incorrect question. The correct question is assuming people are willing to share those old games for free (they are), why should we grant someone the right to stop them? Why should we grant people the right to block the creation of derivatives of 40 year old works?
These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
LocalH · 32d ago
Why should copyright last 70/95/120 years after death of the author/publication/creation (depending on the situation)?
Extension of copyright is theft from the public domain in a way that non-commercial piracy has never and will never be.
wiseowise · 32d ago
Because it doesn’t bring money anymore anyway. Nobody wins by it being unavailable anymore.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
jrflowers · 32d ago
Why not?
AlienRobot · 31d ago
It's impossible to take seriously the argument that copyright is broken because people can't play 1 famous game for free. At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...
wpm · 31d ago
I’d argue it’s broken since the Ordinary Sausage guy was getting DMCA content claims on his YouTube videos where he himself sings parodies of well known songs with sausage themed lyrics in clear, blatant, obvious fair use.
Whenever DMCA let the C evolve into needs to be wiped cleaned and reset/rethought.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 31d ago
> At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...
They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy culture that I grew up on. It just makes copyright law a joke that people will reasonably ignore until it is less farcical. Oh no, boo hoo, they make a little bit less money; I’m over here playing (not a beloved game from my childhood, but) the world’s smallest violin in solidarity for the profits of the largest media conglomerate in the world.
Not trying to attack the above commenter but god damn am I sick of hearing how I should be paying money again to enjoy something I “““owned””” in my childhood. Fuck that every day of the week. I do not want to pay Nintendo to play Pokemon Red, I never will, and that is reasonable even if I choose to play it.
/rant
const_cast · 31d ago
While this is true and a big part of it, we can't deny there's a lot of people right now who would like to play currently active Mario and Zelda games for free. Because they're cheap, or they hate Nintendo, but not enough to not play their games.
Nintendo, believe it or not, needs to make money. No money = no mario. And I like mario. And the seven seas likes mario, too. So that's not good for anyone.
There's a middle ground here, but in terms of messaging such middle ground is severely lacking.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 31d ago
Yes, I agree and appreciate the added nuance which I clearly was not in the mood for with my initial comment. I would not say the same thing about Pokemon Scarlet today, though I probably will be in 30 years. ;)
overgard · 32d ago
I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
luisgvv · 32d ago
You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
epolanski · 31d ago
+1 I can relate completely.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
hulitu · 31d ago
> As for shooters this is the same.
Worse. Why do i need to chat with a character in a FPS ? This is not an RPG.
My issue wit it is the "too much" is just fluff. I'm not overwhelmed because I'm oit of my depth, in that case I'd be excited to sink my teeth into a new system, instead it's pointless or borderline offensive fluff in my face.
fullshark · 31d ago
IDK so many strategy games now involve figuring out what stats to min-max and then even if you figure it out there's gonna be an update that rebalances things anyway so what's the point.
Maybe I'm just older, but none of this seems fun.
383toast · 31d ago
What strategy games don't involve min-maxing to play competitively?
batshit_beaver · 31d ago
Min-maxing is fine, but the endless balance patches force you to relearn the game every few months. So now you have to commit to a live service game full time, just to keep up.
Or you can choose to play StarCraft or chess or something where the rules are basically frozen at this point. Much better ROI on learning these kinds of games than something like Dota.
s1artibartfast · 31d ago
I too am getting old. Sigh...
wellthisisgreat · 32d ago
BFV and 6 and all that are just bad tbh, I can’t imagine a competitive BF1/5/6 etc scene at all- it’s either aim assist hell, or just lowest common denominator of a gaming experience that stuffs you with stimuli and leaves 0 room for any tactics and communication let alone strategy.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
programd · 31d ago
In fact Hell Let Loose is a direct copy - or let us just say homage - of the Reality Mod for Battlefield 3. It's a fantastic game because its roots are in fan made enhancements to the already fine Battlefield games of that era. I'd call it the thinking persons Battlefield.
On the other hand if you want a fun, borderline infringing clone of Battlefield 2042 give Delta Force a try. BF 2042 has about 8,000 daily players now, Delta Force 150,000. Clearly they are doing something right that EA could not with the last BF series entry.
wellthisisgreat · 28d ago
Hmm, I looked at Delta force and I think it’s more of an Escape from Tarkov (EFT) clone in a Call of Duty flavor.
Tarkov is probably the deepest / most engaging FPS of the last decade if not more, so I didn’t really consider its clone - EFTs greatness comes not from its extraction shooter formula but from the unprecedented attention to detail that puts GTA environments to shame. GTA has the macro at, let’s say “district scale” but EFT is unparalleled at street / house scale. It’s the first game where traversing levels makes me at least think about my actions in the context of real world navigation and not game navigation.
I think it’s thanks to: no map, the detailed design, and the fact that many areas are modeled after real locations. It really is quite crazy.
quinnirill · 31d ago
IMO at least on PC, BFV was occasionally a really good shooter, but it was a constant back and forth between updates that ruined the entire game and new swathes of cheaters on the latest exploit not caught by the anti-cheat, until eventually they stopped even trying to stop them.
woolion · 32d ago
It's interesting because the main trend in game-design is to 'streamline' and 'simplify'.
The result is basically that they did the opposite of what we want to achieve in software design: modern game systems are shallow and complicated rather than deep and complex.
One reason is that the older games that are still successful have emergent gameplay -- strategies that weren't planned by the developers but could be found by exploring the space.
If it's so simple to make this analysis, why are these games affected by this problem? Because of business decisions.
The games need to make players jump to new installments.
To do this, they need a compelling reason other than 'we need you to pay full price again', so they introduce new mechanics.
After 20 years of bloat where developers are afraid of abandoning the mechanics from previous generations a lot of systems became both too complex and too complicated, so they simplified by planning out the viable strategies, which generally collapse the hierarchy of strategy layers player could adopt.
This homogenizing force is also greatly driven by e-sports/streaming, where games are designed to be enjoyed as a spectator.
E-sports players want homogeneous strategies as it simplifies greatly adapting to the meta.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players.
To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable.
The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense.
So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge.
But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply survivor bias.
whstl · 32d ago
Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived.
I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.
Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
reddalo · 32d ago
Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July.
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
sandspar · 32d ago
People are pointing out that it's survivorship bias, which is true. But you also have to admit that the game development meta has changed. Microtransactions, gambling, FOMO... it seems like games have gotten more psychological. Like, gamers are being targeted psychologically, using the same sophisticated influence techniques used by casinos or bars or whatever. People haven't caught on that modern researchers have basically "solved" some aspects of human psychology. Especially the aspects that cause us to spend money and to pay attention to things. People also haven't put 2 and 2 together that we're now using these techniques on children.
selivanovp · 32d ago
Old games were created to tell you a story, or surprise you with unusual environment, or unique gameplay, or some mix of above.
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
deadbabe · 32d ago
Increasingly, games are more like events, in the past they weren’t. What you pay for is really like a ticket to participate. If you’re not playing a game with people right when it’s new, when the hype is at its peak, you will miss out on the shared experience and social conversation. There are many games out there you could only have experienced at their full potential for a limited time.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
leecommamichael · 31d ago
Thanks for the refreshing read. In reality, when we play with each other in person, it tends to feel this way. The moment comes and goes. Maybe you had a great game of cards over beers with friends. That doesn't mean every game needs beers and cards. (Although honestly I don't see how that could go wrong with a good group)
DarkNova6 · 32d ago
A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
add-sub-mul-div · 32d ago
That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.
parpfish · 32d ago
i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.
if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?
letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?
would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
vintermann · 31d ago
I think it's not going to happen, precisely because of this. We think we have a certain taste, but as individuals, we hardly do. We want to feel like we are part of something together with other people, and for ultra-customized AI entertainment, it would have to lie to us to give us that (not very sustainable).
usrusr · 31d ago
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
0xDEAFBEAD · 32d ago
"I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"
nntwozz · 32d ago
This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.
Right, when Doom came out, everyone who was interested in computer games and could get their hands on this game would absolutely do so. Similar for other major games like Diablo, WarCraft, Quake, etc. Even if someone didn't end up liking it, there was basically no chance they wouldn't at least try it because these were like THE games to play at the time.
vintermann · 31d ago
A lot of that was because of piracy, though - and the piracy may even have been part of why they were so big. There were a ton of other games coming out at the time which have been mercifully forgotten.
tobylane · 32d ago
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
alkonaut · 32d ago
Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
999900000999 · 32d ago
I want FOSS alternatives for every genre.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
azalemeth · 32d ago
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
johnisgood · 31d ago
Nexuiz is still alive? There is OpenArena too, and lots of ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous, Urban Terror, etc.
okwhateverdude · 31d ago
Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.
johnisgood · 31d ago
Tremulous is more or less dead. Its players moved to Unvanquished, but it is still pretty empty. I remember back when the player count of Tremulous used to be in the hundreds. Good times, had a great childhood. :)
jwitthuhn · 31d ago
If you're interested in a FOSS MTG clone check out XMAGE and Forge. They don't have every card but they do have a whole lot.
I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
OsrsNeedsf2P · 31d ago
If you're into RuneScape, check out 20xxscape.org. It lists a bunch of authentic remakes, many of them open source
That article suffers from a strong case of survivorship bias. Yes, old games die, they go away and are long forgotten - only very few „never die“.
The same is true for new ones. Since the barrier to create games is way lower than in the past, more games are created today leading to even more games dying and fading away.
Newer successful games will be remastered and rebooted for as long as there is a business case for it.
jvanderbot · 31d ago
I once read a book "proving" the Bible was divinely written because it had survived so long. No other text had survived so long! Aside from being flatly incorrect, it was a textbook survivorship bias just like this.
This article could be an SAT question prompt.
BlueTemplar · 32d ago
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
wiether · 32d ago
> "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode".
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
BlueTemplar · 31d ago
Maybe, but I can't recall a game having separate buttons for these : so it's Direct IP connect with maybe LAN advertising (it would make more sense as a checkbox).
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
wcoenen · 31d ago
Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually.
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
Yeah, no, you need to run the community patch. As noted before in the article, it's being actively maintained by the community. You wouldn't expect a 1.0 launch version to run well in 2025.
__turbobrew__ · 32d ago
I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
xeromal · 32d ago
I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is:
>Server Hosting and LAN play
jokoon · 32d ago
I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real.
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
candiddevmike · 32d ago
IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.
const_cast · 31d ago
It also opened the door to more stylistic choices. There's only one way to do realism - realistically. There's infinite ways to do low graphics. Maybe you do a Wind Waker type look, maybe you do a Binding of Isaac type look, maybe you do a Don't Starve type look. All wildly different aesthetics, but all pretty low-graphics.
This is part of the reason, I think, Nintendo games seem to have more soul. The consoles are limited and, in turn, Nintendo dedicates more effort to make their games look stylistically good. Mario Odyssey doesn't have great graphics, but it looks fantastic. Ditto for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile, Concord, Battlefield, COD... they all kind of blend together.
antifa · 29d ago
Low Poly is a market signal for not-filled-with-microtranactions in addition to nostalgia. Plus, a tiny indie dev team who is passionate (not greedy) can do a coherent art design around low poly, whereas anything higher might 100x the work/budget required to make the game look like it's not a salad of random disjointed asset packs.
ofcourseyoudo · 32d ago
"Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it."
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
eterm · 32d ago
Very few of those games you've listed are new games.
Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.
Fortnite: 2017
Apex legends: 2019
Valorant: 2020
Overwatch 2016
COD: Not sure which version you're talking about.
League: 2009
Dota 2: 2013
Roblox: 2006
So from your list, only COD is under 5 years old, and even that might not be depending which version you're talking about!
margalabargala · 32d ago
Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old. How old is too old to be "new"?
thaumasiotes · 32d ago
"New" means you're dependent on an official server.
superkuh · 32d ago
I don't think any of those have private servers that you can run and host games in. They're all far too dependent on microtransactions and in-game-purchased items to implement that kind of robust and long lasting system. They will die because of this as soon as they are not profitable.
Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.
cempaka · 32d ago
At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.
Ekaros · 32d ago
Well 1 person just now running the game. And 3 simultaneously today... Does 3 count as people? Steam's statistics are kinda wild at times.
adwf · 32d ago
Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:
Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)
Apex Legends: February 4, 2019
Valorant: June 2, 2020
Overwatch: May 24, 2016
Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release
League of Legends: October 27, 2009
Dota 2: July 9, 2013
Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)
Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
leecommamichael · 31d ago
I will not blame an LLM, I will blame your laziness for repeating a message you didn't verify.
johnisgood · 31d ago
I know, right?! People misuse a valuable tool and blame the tool for it.
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both!
I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff.
And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
cocoto · 32d ago
The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!
larusso · 31d ago
You are right. I know that. That’s why I stay away from this and buy consoles. Only that they creeped in the same setup. One to play in better quality pay more. Or take the pedestrian version.
johnb231 · 31d ago
$3000 on overpriced junk. Any more than $1500 is a waste of money. It's really not that complicated. Just buy a mid range PC with a cheap 1080p gaming monitor and play the games.
tombert · 32d ago
I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
Uvix · 32d ago
How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?
tombert · 32d ago
I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader
Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
Uvix · 32d ago
I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that...
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
tombert · 32d ago
I don’t really like having to convert EPUBs to mobi. I have had issues with Calibre breaking formatting back when I used a Kindle DX in like 2011. I am sure it’s better at conversion now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, so I like being able to immediately drop the EPUBs into a custom folder and point KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
Uvix · 32d ago
Makes sense.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
tombert · 32d ago
Well one of my Kindles is actually a DX, which can only communicate via 3G which has long been shut down, meaning that the only way to send books to it is via USB, so I don’t think the sendtokindle would work with that.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
squigz · 32d ago
How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming?
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
charcircuit · 32d ago
>Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games”
There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
bigfatkitten · 32d ago
This is probably a regional thing, but in my experience they're in decline.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
mabster · 32d ago
In Australia we used to have a few arcades dotted around the place but I haven't walked past one in a long time. But whenever I go to Japan I'm amazed at how vibrant their arcade scene is. It seems much more communal as well - go hang out at the arcade with your friends.
BlarfMcFlarf · 32d ago
Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
pimlottc · 32d ago
Even without matchmaking issues, it can be difficult for new players to break into a community of diehards who have often been playing together for years.
laconicmatt · 31d ago
This perfectly encapsulates the new Fatal Fury game. It's such a great new release but all the Fatal Fury old heads absolutely obliterate any new players, especially players from more popular backgrounds like Street Fighter or GG Strive.
ivape · 32d ago
The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
esseph · 32d ago
Kinda.
There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
Ekaros · 32d ago
I think it is somewhat true for certain crowd. Like say tv series that are run on schedule. There is certain amount of shared existence when everyone is watching or playing at same time even with single player games.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
sph · 31d ago
The recent wave of early-access indie co-op horror games is proof of that (i.e. Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Backrooms, R.E.P.O., etc.).
They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
consistentlytop · 31d ago
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
gmerc · 31d ago
Old games being available has stopped enshittification and value extraction from VC and PE.
The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user.
The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore.
Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog.
MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
squigz · 31d ago
> MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
No it's not. Game Pass is very popular even with people like me who are massive fans of Steam. And it's been pretty successful for quite a few years now, so not sure what you mean by "trying to"
bombcar · 31d ago
Game Pass is for those willing to admit that an all-you-can-play buffet is fine enough for most people.
Steam is for collectors who want to pretend that someday they’ll play their backlog.
At least digital hoarding is easier for the kids to throw away.
qiine · 31d ago
> The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
sadly true, it's almost comical how all other major game company can't seem to grasp why steam is so successful.
I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.
dartharva · 32d ago
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
leecommamichael · 31d ago
You conveniently ignored all but the first sentence, didn't you? I can respect that, but it is mostly an article about multiplayer games.
dartharva · 31d ago
> it is mostly an article about multiplayer games
Changes nothing about what I said. Plenty of very good multiplayer games out there.
nagaiaida · 31d ago
> Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore.
yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming
whatevaa · 30d ago
Games are not food. We can live without them.
AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued.
Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time.
Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before making a generalized comment about everything.
hyperman1 · 32d ago
The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
sharperguy · 32d ago
Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.
Dove · 31d ago
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
BSDobelix · 31d ago
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
sandspar · 30d ago
Interesting perspective. What media would you say is in its golden age today?
Dove · 28d ago
You tell me. What's awesome right now? :)
Some times are better than others, and I can't tell whether we're in a lull or I just have a case of "getting older" and "kids these days". ;)
I will say that golden ages are typically identified retrospectively. Things get better until they get worse, and then you look back. Like the article, I certainly look back to the 90s as a golden age in gaming in certain ways, but at the time I didn't think that. At the time, I just thought everything was awesome and there was no reason for the party to ever end. What feels like that now?
sandspar · 28d ago
Hmm good question! I think AI chatbots are pretty awesome right now. There's no ads, they're still dumb enough that you can steer them, they're still mostly used by smart people so they haven't been ablated to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think we'll look back on this era of chatbots with nostalgia.
pabs3 · 32d ago
It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
firesteelrain · 32d ago
I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
AlienRobot · 31d ago
Another important point about old games is their file size. When games are under 1 megabyte, you can literally cram thousands of games in a thumb drive and forget about it. It makes them resilient. Someone probably has a copy of the abandonware not because it looked worth preserving but because it was extremely cheap to preserve. By contrast, if your game is several gigabytes, that's several orders of magnitude more expensive to preserve and distribute.
calibas · 31d ago
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:
"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.
Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
dragonwriter · 31d ago
Survivorship bias: if an old game is still around now, it is far out on the resistant-to-dying tail of games of its era.
Lots of old games died.
xchip · 31d ago
MSX games were terrible, that is what pushed me into programming, a game I'm still playing.
I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
If you're an EU citizen and care about video game preservation, I highly suggest joining the European Union Citizen's Initiative in this link. Even if you don't care about video games, it could end up having pro-consumer ramifications for software ownership in general if it manages to go anywhere.
For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video:
AMD recently annoyed the gaming community - who are among the most susceptible to unnecessary upgraditis - by saying that friends don't let friends buy GPUs with more than 8GB VRAM. If you look at the Steam hardware surveys, that's probably true. An M-series Macbook can play most stuff that isn't current AAA. Proton let's you play virtually anything on Linux and it's incredible (plus the Steam Deck). There's no point buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service.
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
bitwize · 32d ago
To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
No comments yet
wtallis · 32d ago
Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.
joshvm · 32d ago
I think this is still survivor bias though, and the games that traditionally offered map editors still do. There are a lot of games nowadays that allow user-contributed levels/content if not full-on mods.
BlueTemplar · 32d ago
Wait, what are you talking about ?
Because AMD also recently announced the cheapest (?) new midrange GPU with 16 Go of VRAM :
It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):
> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
johnb231 · 32d ago
That's right. No one is "annoyed". AMD has the best value 16 GB GPUs on the market.
There is an 8GB version of the 9060. Perfectly suitable option for the majority of gamers around the world.
wileydragonfly · 32d ago
For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen.
But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
TheJoeMan · 32d ago
I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.
Does it have anything to do with barriers to entry for modern games? Just about any modern PC can play Crysis, but you'll need some new hardware to play GTA6 when it comes out.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 31d ago
There are way better games now than before what is the article even talking about. Are they looking only at AAA and multiplayer games?
There are a gazillion indie masterpieces out there, go play!
Game design has improved dramatically in the last 20 years, enjoy that.
dismalaf · 31d ago
It's literally survivorship bias. There were tons of shitty old games. The ones we remember are the good ones.
And AAA publishers don't want to admit it, but gameplay trumps graphics. If I want to see something that looks like real life, I go outside.
POM37 · 31d ago
Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
protocolture · 32d ago
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
ChoGGi · 31d ago
One of the listed games being CS 1.6 is only around because Valve didn't shutdown the master server. As EA/Ubisoft et al. are inclined to do. So it certainly could've and still readily could.
V__ · 32d ago
I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
nottorp · 32d ago
He means "multiplayer games" though.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
smeeger · 31d ago
old games will die as soon as all the millennials die. its so weird how much millennials love to read historical accounts of things that they already know. 90% of HN knows what it was like to play CS 1.6… but this article relates that information as if it were ancient knowledge being unearthed for the first time in centuries.
seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
ololobus · 31d ago
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
jakubmazanec · 31d ago
My favourite old games I like to replay every few years: Jagged Alliance 2 (with the great v1.13 mod) and Railroad Tycoon 2.
agumonkey · 31d ago
This era is also hectic .. more games, more often, more of everything. Hard to go deep into one thing maybe.
iFire · 31d ago
New AAA games are less viable if they can be cracked to delete their live service.
davidcbc · 31d ago
Just the opening paragraph of this article is pure hogwash
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
There are absolutely incredible games still being made across genres. BG3, Hades, Clair Obscur, Celeste, the Horizon series, Balatro, Void Stranger, Elden Ring, these are all examples of all time great games in their respective genres and they all came out in the last 10 years.
> Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties
Final Fantasy XI is still around and it's been going for over 20 years. WoW and FFXIV are as well. You can quibble over what "modern" means, but WoW and FFXIV are still getting full expansions and even FFXI got new content as recently as 2023.
> Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Some have, but there are absolutely games that have not fallen into this trap.
It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts from such an unserious place
bombcar · 31d ago
Balatro is a perfect example of a game that could easily have been made in the 90s, perhaps even the 80s, and yet it’s brand new and really has no similar competitors from that era.
There’s still new things to build.
CivBase · 31d ago
WoW and FFXIV would fall into the author's "live service" category.
davidcbc · 31d ago
Neither of those are driven by free updates and paid for with microtransactions
petee · 31d ago
I played Oregon Trail last night on archive.org -- what a great resource
~6000 on Farmer :)
phendrenad2 · 31d ago
There are lots of new games that will never die. Look at Nintendo games.
throw7 · 31d ago
I don't disagree per se with any of the OP's points, but back in the day I know why I started to dislike newer ones... the console era became "tier 1" and PC became "tier 2".
Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter".
Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios.
Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing.
That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
veunes · 31d ago
Honestly, it's depressing to think how much creativity and community we've lost just because publishers want everything to be a closed garden with a checkout line
throwawaybob420 · 31d ago
Right off the bat the author determines that all recent video games are “disposable pieces of slop”.
Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games?
Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day.
There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
Farbklex · 32d ago
It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
coolThingsFirst · 31d ago
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
leecommamichael · 31d ago
Yeah, the entire article isn't clickbait but they make several very controversial statements in it. It's just talking about multiplayer games. The author isn't exactly a great communicator.
protocolture · 32d ago
>It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
leecommamichael · 31d ago
1. The article is about multiplayer games, not all games (as the headline would imply.)
2. I thought they might be talking about design decisions that make for "lasting fun" but really they're advocating for design decisions that afford the game being functioning software without the corporate entity which produced it continuing to breathe life (and money) into it.
I think it's fine that things die. Also my god that first line is a flaming hot take.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think Netflix and the streaming industry in general aspires to convert movies into a planned obsolescence business model; in the beginning Netflix's selling point was that they had an archive of every DVD ever made, but now increasingly they're conditioning us to expect that stuff's going to leave the platform sooner or later. Why? If all we watch are the classics there's not much point to keep subscribing to a streaming service, just download/buy the classics, and then you're done. They are having trouble with this however because the movies they put out just aren't as good as the older stuff; I've read the data indicates that people are mostly watching 90s stuff on Netflix, so they can't purge it from the platform just yet. But they will try.
The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel. They switched to a planned obsolescence model one day and we just went along with it.
I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.
Much of the gaming population are not following this stuff as closely, and get burned once or twice before they realize what's happening. I think it's good to pressure companies ahead of time, and vote with your wallet when you can.
Can I play CoD4 on xbox 360 anymore? Single AND multiplayer? I genuinely don't know the answer to that because I haven't tried within the past decade(+). Should I be able to? Absolutely yes. But I have a sneaking suspicion all the multiplayer servers are shut down.
While I'm not going to say you can't vote with your wallet.
You can also just vote with a vote ... Companies group up together all the time to create trade unions to advance legislation in their favor. There's nothing wrong with individuals grouping together for a non-commercial interest.
Even Halo (Infinite) couldn't manage it
Stop buying this kind of game if you are expecting game preservation from one of the worst studios running.
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It's the same problem with movies. They're so unbelievably expensive that nobody will dare pay for something that isn't already proven. But if you do something that's proven, there's a good chance it's just gonna come up second best. Worst case scenario, it comes out as uninspired slop, destined for the bargain bin, like Concord.
RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.
A barrel entirely of your own creation. Just don't buy their games and done. I've never subscribed to a game in my life and never gave a shit about the difference. Anyone at all can do this. You describe these games as if they were some vital service like email or cloud storage (and even those have solutions against companies that become abusive).
It's not this. It's simply that the level of quality and features and competition in modern games is so insanely high that developer time is devoted to other things and custom servers and modding is relatively niche and doesn't move the quality needle enough.
Time is limited and focusing on custom servers means less time spent elsewhere.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/10
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
---------
The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.
Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.
On top of which, the author of the IP has increasingly aggravated a significant segment of their fan base.
It’s entirely unfair to expect it to continue to pull numbers similar to a dedicated multiplayer game.
Very few single-player story games have much replayability, though they do exist (usually rogue likes or heavily moddable).
No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.
And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
Adding them to steam and forcing proton is also simpler than something like bottles for me.
People try to run them on W10/11 and they won't start, the windows compatibility layer hardly gets them up and running.
But of course, you can run dosbox on windows, too.
This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons:
- It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save? TOO BAD. Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
- And the flipside of that: that paying for live service games, you get consistent updates, new content, new cosmetics, etc, etc. You also get features like cloud saves. You don't have to worry about managing 100s of CDs or worry about a scratch on them or anything like that.
Is there a problem these days with online-only games being shut down? Yes, absolutely, and I hope the industry moves away from that.
Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
Not every game released today is a live service game and I'm pretty sure people would have had the same objections back in those days.
> Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
People advocating for video game preservation aren't advocating we all go back to CD-ROM. Video game preservation can be done digitally perfectly fine.
What people are advocating for is that games are designed to remain at least functional once the company doesn't deem it financially viable to provide services for that game anymore.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
Not folk remedies, you can take it to a game store and most have the equipment to resurface the CD.
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
> This comment on society is driven home (or in fact, not driven at all) even further by the computer AI. It doesn't even leave the starting gate. Much like the dreams and aspirations we harbour as youth, reving our engines on a starting line where the crack of the pistol never comes. Meanwhile, those of privledge cruise to easy victory, unconcerned over such mundane things as rent or grocery bills or collideable landscapes.
Truly only a masterpiece could gift us with an experience like that.
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
There is no survivor bias, you [insert insult]!
So many of those games were really bad even at their time. BUT YOU CAN STILL PLAY THEM. I've tossed many games out of my catalogue and for some I wished they vanish from existence and they all have survived!
While article is recycling narrative - it has a reason, but your recycled opinion is not only wrong but has no reason other than lowkey nitpick article.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
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Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
https://eveonline.com
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.
Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...
Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.
Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.
I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc.
There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
You don’t need a battle pass to play, in fact all purchasable things are purely cosmetic: they offer no gameplay value. Nobody is playing Fortnite for the cosmetics, they’re playing it because it’s fun! Why would you care about cosmetics in a game you don’t enjoy playing? It makes no sense.
“no depth”: patently false. Fortnite is one of the highest skill ceiling games around.
“no cool mechanics”: there are tons of cool mechanics, both at a gameplay level and meta level, with more being cycled in every season.
“no story”: admittedly the story is a bit opaque, but the community loves the big story events that happen every season.
“no easter eggs or secrets”: Sure there are! Each new season is filled with them, and there are entire wikis dedicated to cataloguing them.
Look, there is no depth in Fortnite, just like there is no deepness in minds of kids that are under 10 and playing it.
Same for other points. Fortnite is arcade shooter - no one is expecting from it realistic mechanics, which would also ruin the game. Fortnite is a niche and it was kids game - some of them have grown up and moved on.
The tone of your post makes me think you’ve fallen into the logical trap of believing that because a game is enjoyed by children, that it can’t be also enjoyed by older people as well. See also: Minecraft.
A true sign of maturity is being able to enjoy a game on its actual merits, and not worrying about whether you’re playing a “kids’ game”.
but yeah, it's by far the least egregious case indeed.
https://www.esports.net/news/fortnite/do-all-fortnite-skins-...
I'm pretty sure you could find dozens of sources confirming that too, but I don't have the time atm.
Confirmed here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1agkxcd/the_gia...
(only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit box)
Not so great games have existed as long as games existed. Parent's point is that the few good ones stay. And could imagine someone in 20 years replaying BOTW, or This war of Mine, same way Journey still has many active players 13 years later.
I didn't say that there are no good new games anymore, there are of course good titles great games your example is one, but the market shifted because the cash is elsewhere.
If you compare the profit for a game like BOTW despite being huge success by unit sales, and the yearly profit of a game like Fortnite as some of the commenters pointed, or CoD you will see what I mean, those tittles literally print money with in game shops not unit sales.
I agree with you, and this was my main point in 20 years someone will replay BOTW because it is a great game, the ones that are made to simply print money will be replaced by others that prints money faster, and better.
If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.
> no depth
If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.
> no cool mechanics
Subjective but I disagree.
> no story nothing
Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.
> and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
I am probably in the 98th percentile of time playing video games, and have a lot of friends that play. I really don't disagree with most of your post, but this sentence grabbed me. A person "finding value" in something destructive is not a "different strokes for different folks" situation.
It's more likely they are caught in a desperate situation, either from chasing money that will never materialize or some other kind of high. The cycle of gambling long term is horrible. It's an addictive and destructive pattern with no end in sight, and it ruins lives, and not just the life of the gambler.
While it's rare for a similarly extreme situation to happen with online games, it's less about losing all of your money and more about losing all of your time. It's not uncommon for people to play these games more compulsively than anything, while having 0 fun. Some are self-aware enough to wish they weren't playing it altogether, while being unable to stop. And I realize this can come off condescending, but some people are unaware that they aren't having fun and are sad at the end of the day, unable to confront why. It would not be wise to fault the people themselves with this behavior. There are games designed to foster this compulsion.
I don't think this is unique to online games. There are certainly single-player games that can impart the same feelings. But there are bad design decisions that are more common to online games that are meant to create addiction. Take daily quests: Where they are present, they are the only decent way to progress in a game. They fucking suck, are universally hated, but people still play everyday, even if they don't feel like it. The game can obviously be balanced to provide better general progression and omit daily quests, which would let people play when they feel like it. But designers choose not to do this, because research shows people play more when they login every day. And the longer people are playing, the more likely they can be monetized.
And that's an inherent issue with recent online games that build a revenue model on micro transactions: They are trying to make you play as long as possible to maximize conversion. That's not a healthy relationship with a customer. These games are distinct from Chess, not because they lack depth or mechanics, but because they are fine-tuned to make you chase the next thing, forever. Many people recognize this, don't enjoy it, and can't stop. The same way many kids are hyper aware of their addiction to scrolling, but continue to scroll.
So yes, people play these games, but that doesn't mean they have value even to the player. They just have the bells and whistles to keep people hooked. For my own part, it's a constant battle to be aware of when I'm having fun and when I'm getting sucked into something unhealthy.
I see we've reached "grumpy old man yelling at cloud" levels of rhetoric.
Sure, there's predatory micro transactions, but there's absolutely also neat new content and mechanics added to games like Dota or Fortnite. Dota just recently got a couple of fuck off huge patches that I saw the notes for (I don't play it myself but occasionally see things mentioned in the Deadlock community).
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
Now that game was worth every byte.
0: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
you can still play those old "bad" games, they still exist.
Even the successful games of today are likely to die eventually. Ubisoft's The Crew was relatively successful, but they shut down the servers and made the game unplayable. Now they're talking about at least adding an "offline mode" but core features of the game would still be unavailable to the customers who bought it.
The difference with games today is that many are designed to require a connection to company servers - and those servers cannot be self-hosted. Eventually it won't be profitable for the company to continue running those servers and they'll shut them down. Unless companies are forced to provide an EOL plan that allows customers to continue playing the games they bought (could be self-hosted servers, open source, patching out the server requirement, etc), modern games will continue to die at an increasing rate.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
Games need time to become classics, because we need time to realize how impactful they were and how much they live in our memories.
There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium. This applies to film as well. The last fifteen years have largely been dreadful and nobody is going to remember dozens of conveyor belt produced Marvel slop films. People will still watch Coppola and Kubrick in 30 years.
And that's btw 20-30 years before I was born, you see my birthdate in my username. I don't appeal to "what I remember" when looking at media.
A few great movies are made in any period of history, along with a lot of commercial stuff along with B-D grade crap. Not all movies made in the last couple of movies are Marvel movies. It sounds like you picked great movies that were made in the past to watch when you were growing up, and those are the formative movies for you. It doesn't in any way negate what I said. It is still "what you remember".
So not to be an old fart but I think previous generations really were spoiled by a much better on average library. Then again there are many phenomenal indie games coming out lately. Some of the best games, in my opinion, of the last 30 years, came out this decade: Outer Wilds and Animal Well, for example.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
If so, they deserve it.
There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.
> If so, they deserve it.
The majority of users have no idea that they are getting milked and their data end up in the hand of Ad companies and law enforcement.
For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore."
So, we've tried pinning it on individuals for a while, it's clearly not the right angle. What else might be? Could it be that the systems analysis is on the right track?
Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of <X> who is capable of changing things for not doing so.".
For example, the 2022 Halloween Crushing incident in Seoul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Halloween_crowd_crush?wp...
Whose "fault" was it? If we had a quantum supercomputer and video from every angle I bet we could calculate the first person to panic and start running. Have we successfully de-obfuscated the situation and found our culprit? I'm not sure, after all, two people away was a person about to panic as well, in fact they would have in exactly 2 seconds after the first person if the first person hadn't... In fact everyone on the crowd was on edge and on the verge of panic, hence why the crush was able to happen at all. So in that sense it's not really obfuscation to do a systems analysis on crowd dynamics to figure out why the crush happened.
And now hold on, whether we want to blame the individual that kicked off the panic or everyone in the crowd for not keeping their cool, is it fair, reasonable, or accurate to assign blame? These people hopped on a train and went to a Halloween party - surely it's reasonable to expect that on such a day, crowd control measures would be in place to keep them safe. After all, society keeps them safe from other things they don't really need to worry about - separating cars and pedestrians, keeping the water clean, flushing away their poo. Isn't it reasonable for them to assume that roads would be designed wide enough to accommodate a lot of people? That there'd be multiple exits? If so, then it's the fault of the bar for not communicating the tight pedestrian situation, or doing crowd limiting. Er, well, not just one bar, but the 20 that are in that area. Also the chief of police for not setting up proper crowd control, and the traffic commissioner for not instructing the chief to do so. Or mayor. Actually maybe the city planner for allowing such narrow areas to develop into popular bar areas at all. No not the city planner in 2022, the one in 1985 when they were rebuilding that area after the war.
I think especially in the western world there's a habit, maybe borne of western hyper individualism, to always try to find the individualist angle. "Well maybe people should take more personal responsibility for their safety!" And if people want to live that way I think they should be allowed to. Far away. Remotely, on farms or something lol. For those of us that prefer living more dense lifestyles in societies, I think it makes a lot more sense to take a systems analysis approach to these kinds of problems with reasonable good faith baked in.
Often it's not obfuscation, often situations simply are complicated to where it's impossible to blame the individual without contorting into strange value systems.
PS I for one do not blame anyone. If you enjoy something - that is not going to last forever.
These guys wrote a custom server from scratch and have hacked up the original game itself as well. It's hosted completely by the community.
where can I read more about this?
Like which?
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it.
Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.
Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.
Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
This will never be required. An artist is free to keep their art for themselves and never make a copy.
Once an artist has distributed a copy however, the question becomes, why aren't other people free to do things they are capable of doing, like making additional copies?
These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
Extension of copyright is theft from the public domain in a way that non-commercial piracy has never and will never be.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
Whenever DMCA let the C evolve into needs to be wiped cleaned and reset/rethought.
They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy culture that I grew up on. It just makes copyright law a joke that people will reasonably ignore until it is less farcical. Oh no, boo hoo, they make a little bit less money; I’m over here playing (not a beloved game from my childhood, but) the world’s smallest violin in solidarity for the profits of the largest media conglomerate in the world.
Not trying to attack the above commenter but god damn am I sick of hearing how I should be paying money again to enjoy something I “““owned””” in my childhood. Fuck that every day of the week. I do not want to pay Nintendo to play Pokemon Red, I never will, and that is reasonable even if I choose to play it.
/rant
Nintendo, believe it or not, needs to make money. No money = no mario. And I like mario. And the seven seas likes mario, too. So that's not good for anyone.
There's a middle ground here, but in terms of messaging such middle ground is severely lacking.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
Worse. Why do i need to chat with a character in a FPS ? This is not an RPG.
Maybe I'm just older, but none of this seems fun.
Or you can choose to play StarCraft or chess or something where the rules are basically frozen at this point. Much better ROI on learning these kinds of games than something like Dota.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
On the other hand if you want a fun, borderline infringing clone of Battlefield 2042 give Delta Force a try. BF 2042 has about 8,000 daily players now, Delta Force 150,000. Clearly they are doing something right that EA could not with the last BF series entry.
Tarkov is probably the deepest / most engaging FPS of the last decade if not more, so I didn’t really consider its clone - EFTs greatness comes not from its extraction shooter formula but from the unprecedented attention to detail that puts GTA environments to shame. GTA has the macro at, let’s say “district scale” but EFT is unparalleled at street / house scale. It’s the first game where traversing levels makes me at least think about my actions in the context of real world navigation and not game navigation.
I think it’s thanks to: no map, the detailed design, and the fact that many areas are modeled after real locations. It really is quite crazy.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players. To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable. The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense. So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge. But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
[0] https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Gauges
I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.
Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.
https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?
letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?
would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
It was more of a monoculture.
https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
https://github.com/magefree/mage https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
[0] https://20xxscape.org
https://osgameclones.com/
The same is true for new ones. Since the barrier to create games is way lower than in the past, more games are created today leading to even more games dying and fading away. Newer successful games will be remastered and rebooted for as long as there is a business case for it.
This article could be an SAT question prompt.
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
* https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
Is that the one you used?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/13240/Unreal_Tournament_G...
>Server Hosting and LAN play
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
This is part of the reason, I think, Nintendo games seem to have more soul. The consoles are limited and, in turn, Nintendo dedicates more effort to make their games look stylistically good. Mario Odyssey doesn't have great graphics, but it looks fantastic. Ditto for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile, Concord, Battlefield, COD... they all kind of blend together.
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.
So from your list, only COD is under 5 years old, and even that might not be depending which version you're talking about!Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.
Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)
Apex Legends: February 4, 2019
Valorant: June 2, 2020
Overwatch: May 24, 2016
Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release
League of Legends: October 27, 2009
Dota 2: July 9, 2013
Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)
Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user.
The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore.
Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog.
MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
No it's not. Game Pass is very popular even with people like me who are massive fans of Steam. And it's been pretty successful for quite a few years now, so not sure what you mean by "trying to"
Steam is for collectors who want to pretend that someday they’ll play their backlog.
At least digital hoarding is easier for the kids to throw away.
sadly true, it's almost comical how all other major game company can't seem to grasp why steam is so successful.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
(Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
Changes nothing about what I said. Plenty of very good multiplayer games out there.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-d...
yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming
AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued.
Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time.
Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before making a generalized comment about everything.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
Some times are better than others, and I can't tell whether we're in a lull or I just have a case of "getting older" and "kids these days". ;)
I will say that golden ages are typically identified retrospectively. Things get better until they get worse, and then you look back. Like the article, I certainly look back to the 90s as a golden age in gaming in certain ways, but at the time I didn't think that. At the time, I just thought everything was awesome and there was no reason for the party to ever end. What feels like that now?
Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:
"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.
Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
Lots of old games died.
I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
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Because AMD also recently announced the cheapest (?) new midrange GPU with 16 Go of VRAM :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/amds-radeon-rx-9060-xt-want...
It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):
> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
There is an 8GB version of the 9060. Perfectly suitable option for the majority of gamers around the world.
But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
There are a gazillion indie masterpieces out there, go play!
Game design has improved dramatically in the last 20 years, enjoy that.
And AAA publishers don't want to admit it, but gameplay trumps graphics. If I want to see something that looks like real life, I go outside.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
There are absolutely incredible games still being made across genres. BG3, Hades, Clair Obscur, Celeste, the Horizon series, Balatro, Void Stranger, Elden Ring, these are all examples of all time great games in their respective genres and they all came out in the last 10 years.
> Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties
Final Fantasy XI is still around and it's been going for over 20 years. WoW and FFXIV are as well. You can quibble over what "modern" means, but WoW and FFXIV are still getting full expansions and even FFXI got new content as recently as 2023.
> Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Some have, but there are absolutely games that have not fallen into this trap.
It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts from such an unserious place
There’s still new things to build.
~6000 on Farmer :)
Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter".
Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios.
Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing.
That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games?
Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day.
There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
2. I thought they might be talking about design decisions that make for "lasting fun" but really they're advocating for design decisions that afford the game being functioning software without the corporate entity which produced it continuing to breathe life (and money) into it.
I think it's fine that things die. Also my god that first line is a flaming hot take.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.