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Comment by DataDaoDe | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity about the gaming journalism you are talking about, what gaming era did you grow up in? For instance, for me it was the mid 90s to early 2000s, the days of the demo cds, etc. Somehow the whole watching other people play games movement missed me, not saying that's good or bad, maybe its just an artifact of my own life and has little to do with my generation in general.

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I grew up with magazines (and demo CDs) before the Internet. I worked for a while in the game industry, so I've always kept up with it.

I just don't have time to play another 100+ hour RPG or slog my way through a FromSoftware game, but I do want to keep tabs on what is being done. Sampling 5 or 6 hours of the 100 hours of gameplay for games I know I am unlikely to purchase was a compromise. Then it became a habit. I now definitely spend more time watching people play new release games than watching Netflix, etc.

And this habit has resulted in me buying and enjoying games I never would have found otherwise.

I’m into it from like an eSports perspective, but I will say that streamed gameplay is a pretty good preview indicator for games that don’t have demos. Streamers can be biased, but there are fundamental things they cannot fake, like say how pleasant the UX is.

Demos are limited in that often they’re a short snippet of game and may not be indicative of the whole thing.

Your mention of demo CDs just made me extremely nostalgic for the days where I played Star Wars: Rebel Assault, loaded from a CD-ROM in a single-speed Mitsumi drive. The loading times were probably atrocious but the graphics were cool…

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