[HN Gopher] Why old games never die, but new ones do
___________________________________________________________________
Why old games never die, but new ones do
Author : airhangerf15
Score : 272 points
Date : 2025-05-24 21:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pleromanonx86.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pleromanonx86.wordpress.com)
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
| gmuslera wrote:
| 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?
| secstate wrote:
| 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.
| pasta67 wrote:
| 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600.
|
| Now _that_ game was worth every byte.
| jghn wrote:
| Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still
| playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1]
|
| [1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's
| +Wh...
| dragonmost wrote:
| Well now i gotta find a way to play this
| adjagu wrote:
| There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1].
|
| 1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-
| House_Adve...
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
| bitwize wrote:
| Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
| spacechild1 wrote:
| 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.
| anonymars wrote:
| This is my favorite review comment on that game:
| https://www.gamespot.com/big-rigs-over-the-road-
| racing/user-... e.g.
|
| > 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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!
| nwallin wrote:
| City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community
| servers have a license from the publisher.
| CrossVR wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| Discordian93 wrote:
| You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube
| anymore.
| GLabrie wrote:
| There are private servers that you can connect to, no? I
| remember reading about it not that long ago!
| chmod775 wrote:
| https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv
| rawling wrote:
| Even all the offline content?
| wtetzner wrote:
| You can, and you can even play it with Dreamcast and PC
| players: https://sylverant.net/
| Firehawke wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| 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
| fendy3002 wrote:
| beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher
| risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.
| foxglacier wrote:
| The unit being a $20 CD-ROM drive? Losing the disk would be
| a bigger problem than damaging the drive.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| At that point I think the game is available as ROM file or
| at least the owner of rare one should make such.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 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
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/10
| ta12653421 wrote:
| Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without
| install etc.
| shakna wrote:
| There's quite a few ports to the browser running around,
| though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| "of its time"
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Counterstrike was the defining game for a subgenre of
| tactical shooters, of which you can see that Valorant is
| a member.
| pasta67 wrote:
| 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.
| whoisyc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The main difference with the newer version is better
| graphics, but that comes at the expense of minimum specs,
| loading time, etc.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-
| infinite/id1096540165
| armada651 wrote:
| 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.
| mattmanser wrote:
| That's not actually true.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| can you provide an example?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD
| version?
| nilamo wrote:
| All of us who never hooked the dreamcast up to the
| internet.
| Firehawke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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.
| armada651 wrote:
| > 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.
| Sleaker wrote:
| > 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.
| strken wrote:
| 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.
| vitehozonage wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
| mancerayder wrote:
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| klodolph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Expedition 33 had a huge launch and was a fantastic RPG
| experience. Far better to my tastes than games like
| Oblivion or Skyrim.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Eve Online is over 20 years old, and still releases new
| game content, and has their annual FanFest get-together
| in Iceland.
|
| https://eveonline.com
| tpxl wrote:
| On the other hand, Overwatch 1 is dead because Blizzard
| said so.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zx10rse wrote:
| 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.
| duckmysick wrote:
| There are indie games without those in-app purchases that
| capture the spirit of the old games.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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.
| MattRix wrote:
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.esports.net/news/fortnite/do-all-fortnite-
| skins-...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Do you really consider "esports.net" a source for the
| internal implementation details of a proprietary video
| game?
| guilamu wrote:
| 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.
|
| Confirmed here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comm
| ents/1agkxcd/the_gia...
|
| (only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit
| box)
| blueboo wrote:
| Fortnite's dark design was the reason Epic was subject of
| the largest FTC gaming-related fine in history. $200m+
| MattRix wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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).
| Xelbair wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| safety1st wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord
| DrillShopper wrote:
| 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.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| csense wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| pasta67 wrote:
| Frankly, there is not much difference - gog is already part
| of the problem.
| veunes wrote:
| 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.
| parineum wrote:
| 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.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| Final Fantasy was on release #11 by the time Steam was
| initially released in 2003.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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).
| CivBase wrote:
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| 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
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| 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.
| nntwozz wrote:
| This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.
|
| It was more of a monoculture.
|
| https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| "I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never
| heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"
| usrusr wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| 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?
| lesser23 wrote:
| 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.
| Uvix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| 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.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > 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?
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| LocalH wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not?
| ijk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once
| - would help a lot.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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...
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. ;)
| V__ wrote:
| 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.
| ivape wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Kinda.
|
| There's a lot of very good single player games out there that
| this does not touch on.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| joshvm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| wtallis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wait, what are you talking about ?
|
| 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...
| johnb231 wrote:
| 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.
| joshvm wrote:
| https://wccftech.com/amd-says-8gb-vram-is-sufficient-as-
| majo...
|
| 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
| john-h-k wrote:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Su...
| xeromal wrote:
| I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is:
|
| >Server Hosting and LAN play
| squigz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of "redemption
| games"
|
| There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| johnb231 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "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 wrote:
| 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...
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
| ofcourseyoudo wrote:
| "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.
| cempaka wrote:
| At first I did a double take because I thought you said there
| are still people playing _Phantasmagoria_.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I will not blame an LLM, I will blame your laziness for
| repeating a message you didn't verify.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I know, right?! People misuse a valuable tool and blame the
| tool for it.
| eterm wrote:
| 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!
| johnb231 wrote:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrY...
| margalabargala wrote:
| Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old.
| How old is too old to be "new"?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| "New" means you're dependent on an official server.
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| >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.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| 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.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" :
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
|
| (Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
| reddalo wrote:
| 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.
| sandspar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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.)
| zeroq wrote:
| The biggest problem today is _ownership_.
|
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| > Some of those games are single player only.
|
| Like which?
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.".
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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.
| rjbwork wrote:
| You can host them though, if you really want. Look at
| https://freeinfantry.com/
|
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| 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.
| AEVL wrote:
| > "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis"
|
| where can I read more about this?
| tombert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop
| Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?
| tombert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| overgard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| +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 wrote:
| > 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.
| MrJagil wrote:
| I play dota 1 again now! https://firstbloodgaming.com/
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| 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)
| quinnirill wrote:
| 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.
| programd wrote:
| 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.
| woolion wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0] https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Gauges
| HK-NC wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What strategy games don't involve min-maxing to play
| competitively?
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I too am getting old. Sigh...
| dartharva wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > it is mostly an article about multiplayer games
|
| Changes nothing about what I said. Plenty of very good
| multiplayer games out there.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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
| joshlemer wrote:
| 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).
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nexuiz is still alive? There is OpenArena too, and lots of
| ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous, Urban Terror, etc.
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| 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.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/magefree/mage https://github.com/Card-
| Forge/forge
| MrJagil wrote:
| Or https://cockatrice.github.io/
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| If you're into RuneScape, check out 20xxscape.org. It lists a
| bunch of authentic remakes, many of them open source
|
| [0] https://20xxscape.org
| ajot wrote:
| You can check Open Source clones, inspired by, recreations of
| the engine, etc at OS Game Clones
|
| https://osgameclones.com/
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| pabs3 wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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.
| larusso wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply
| play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!
| larusso wrote:
| 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.
| Farbklex wrote:
| 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.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.
| tobylane wrote:
| 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.
| Dove wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| consistentlytop wrote:
| 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.
| ololobus wrote:
| 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
| wcoenen wrote:
| 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.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| UT99 is being maintained with a community patch:
|
| * https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
|
| Is that the one you used?
| Firehawke wrote:
| 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.
| POM37 wrote:
| 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.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gmerc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This era is also hectic .. more games, more often, more of
| everything. Hard to go deep into one thing maybe.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| There are lots of new games that will never die. Look at Nintendo
| games.
| throw7 wrote:
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| iFire wrote:
| New AAA games are less viable if they can be cracked to delete
| their live service.
| everyone wrote:
| https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
| CivBase wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI
| throwawaybob420 wrote:
| 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.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| 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.
| xchip wrote:
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| 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
| calibas wrote:
| > 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.
| leecommamichael wrote:
| 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.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| My favourite old games I like to replay every few years: Jagged
| Alliance 2 (with the great v1.13 mod) and Railroad Tycoon 2.
| davidcbc wrote:
| 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
| CivBase wrote:
| WoW and FFXIV would fall into the author's "live service"
| category.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Neither of those are driven by free updates and paid for with
| microtransactions
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| pflenker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dismalaf wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| petee wrote:
| I played Oregon Trail last night on archive.org -- what a great
| resource
|
| ~6000 on Farmer :)
| nagaiaida wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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
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