Why old games never die, but new ones do
pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
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...
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
There is no survivor bias, you [insert insult]!
So many of those games were really bad even at their time. BUT YOU CAN STILL PLAY THEM. I've tossed many games out of my catalogue and for some I wished they vanish from existence and they all have survived!
While article is recycling narrative - it has a reason, but your recycled opinion is not only wrong but has no reason other than lowkey nitpick article.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
Now that game was worth every byte.
[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
> This comment on society is driven home (or in fact, not driven at all) even further by the computer AI. It doesn't even leave the starting gate. Much like the dreams and aspirations we harbour as youth, reving our engines on a starting line where the crack of the pistol never comes. Meanwhile, those of privledge cruise to easy victory, unconcerned over such mundane things as rent or grocery bills or collideable landscapes.
Truly only a masterpiece could gift us with an experience like that.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
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
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
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The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.
On top of which, the author of the IP has increasingly aggravated a significant segment of their fan base.
It’s entirely unfair to expect it to continue to pull numbers similar to a dedicated multiplayer game.
Very few single-player story games have much replayability, though they do exist (usually rogue likes or heavily moddable).
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.
And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
But of course, you can run dosbox on windows, too.
Adding them to steam and forcing proton is also simpler than something like bottles for me.
People try to run them on W10/11 and they won't start, the windows compatibility layer hardly gets them up and running.
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.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
Not 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.
Not folk remedies, you can take it to a game store and most have the equipment to resurface the CD.
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.
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.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.
Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...
Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.
Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.
I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
0: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
Games need time to become classics, because we need time to realize how impactful they were and how much they live in our memories.
There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium. This applies to film as well. The last fifteen years have largely been dreadful and nobody is going to remember dozens of conveyor belt produced Marvel slop films. People will still watch Coppola and Kubrick in 30 years.
And that's btw 20-30 years before I was born, you see my birthdate in my username. I don't appeal to "what I remember" when looking at media.
A few great movies are made in any period of history, along with a lot of commercial stuff along with B-D grade crap. Not all movies made in the last couple of movies are Marvel movies. It sounds like you picked great movies that were made in the past to watch when you were growing up, and those are the formative movies for you. It doesn't in any way negate what I said. It is still "what you remember".
Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc.
There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
You don’t need a battle pass to play, in fact all purchasable things are purely cosmetic: they offer no gameplay value. Nobody is playing Fortnite for the cosmetics, they’re playing it because it’s fun! Why would you care about cosmetics in a game you don’t enjoy playing? It makes no sense.
“no depth”: patently false. Fortnite is one of the highest skill ceiling games around.
“no cool mechanics”: there are tons of cool mechanics, both at a gameplay level and meta level, with more being cycled in every season.
“no story”: admittedly the story is a bit opaque, but the community loves the big story events that happen every season.
“no easter eggs or secrets”: Sure there are! Each new season is filled with them, and there are entire wikis dedicated to cataloguing them.
but yeah, it's by far the least egregious case indeed.
https://www.esports.net/news/fortnite/do-all-fortnite-skins-...
I'm pretty sure you could find dozens of sources confirming that too, but I don't have the time atm.
Confirmed here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1agkxcd/the_gia...
(only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit box)
Look, there is no depth in Fortnite, just like there is no deepness in minds of kids that are under 10 and playing it.
Same for other points. Fortnite is arcade shooter - no one is expecting from it realistic mechanics, which would also ruin the game. Fortnite is a niche and it was kids game - some of them have grown up and moved on.
The tone of your post makes me think you’ve fallen into the logical trap of believing that because a game is enjoyed by children, that it can’t be also enjoyed by older people as well. See also: Minecraft.
A true sign of maturity is being able to enjoy a game on its actual merits, and not worrying about whether you’re playing a “kids’ game”.
Not so great games have existed as long as games existed. Parent's point is that the few good ones stay. And could imagine someone in 20 years replaying BOTW, or This war of Mine, same way Journey still has many active players 13 years later.
I didn't say that there are no good new games anymore, there are of course good titles great games your example is one, but the market shifted because the cash is elsewhere.
If you compare the profit for a game like BOTW despite being huge success by unit sales, and the yearly profit of a game like Fortnite as some of the commenters pointed, or CoD you will see what I mean, those tittles literally print money with in game shops not unit sales.
I agree with you, and this was my main point in 20 years someone will replay BOTW because it is a great game, the ones that are made to simply print money will be replaced by others that prints money faster, and better.
If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.
> no depth
If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.
> no cool mechanics
Subjective but I disagree.
> no story nothing
Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.
> and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
I am probably in the 98th percentile of time playing video games, and have a lot of friends that play. I really don't disagree with most of your post, but this sentence grabbed me. A person "finding value" in something destructive is not a "different strokes for different folks" situation.
It's more likely they are caught in a desperate situation, either from chasing money that will never materialize or some other kind of high. The cycle of gambling long term is horrible. It's an addictive and destructive pattern with no end in sight, and it ruins lives, and not just the life of the gambler.
While it's rare for a similarly extreme situation to happen with online games, it's less about losing all of your money and more about losing all of your time. It's not uncommon for people to play these games more compulsively than anything, while having 0 fun. Some are self-aware enough to wish they weren't playing it altogether, while being unable to stop. And I realize this can come off condescending, but some people are unaware that they aren't having fun and are sad at the end of the day, unable to confront why. It would not be wise to fault the people themselves with this behavior. There are games designed to foster this compulsion.
I don't think this is unique to online games. There are certainly single-player games that can impart the same feelings. But there are bad design decisions that are more common to online games that are meant to create addiction. Take daily quests: Where they are present, they are the only decent way to progress in a game. They fucking suck, are universally hated, but people still play everyday, even if they don't feel like it. The game can obviously be balanced to provide better general progression and omit daily quests, which would let people play when they feel like it. But designers choose not to do this, because research shows people play more when they login every day. And the longer people are playing, the more likely they can be monetized.
And that's an inherent issue with recent online games that build a revenue model on micro transactions: They are trying to make you play as long as possible to maximize conversion. That's not a healthy relationship with a customer. These games are distinct from Chess, not because they lack depth or mechanics, but because they are fine-tuned to make you chase the next thing, forever. Many people recognize this, don't enjoy it, and can't stop. The same way many kids are hyper aware of their addiction to scrolling, but continue to scroll.
So yes, people play these games, but that doesn't mean they have value even to the player. They just have the bells and whistles to keep people hooked. For my own part, it's a constant battle to be aware of when I'm having fun and when I'm getting sucked into something unhealthy.
I see we've reached "grumpy old man yelling at cloud" levels of rhetoric.
Sure, there's predatory micro transactions, but there's absolutely also neat new content and mechanics added to games like Dota or Fortnite. Dota just recently got a couple of fuck off huge patches that I saw the notes for (I don't play it myself but occasionally see things mentioned in the Deadlock community).
you can still play those old "bad" games, they still exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.
Much of the gaming population are not following this stuff as closely, and get burned once or twice before they realize what's happening. I think it's good to pressure companies ahead of time, and vote with your wallet when you can.
Can I play CoD4 on xbox 360 anymore? Single AND multiplayer? I genuinely don't know the answer to that because I haven't tried within the past decade(+). Should I be able to? Absolutely yes. But I have a sneaking suspicion all the multiplayer servers are shut down.
While I'm not going to say you can't vote with your wallet.
You can also just vote with a vote ... Companies group up together all the time to create trade unions to advance legislation in their favor. There's nothing wrong with individuals grouping together for a non-commercial interest.
RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Like which?
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
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.
For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore."
So, we've tried pinning it on individuals for a while, it's clearly not the right angle. What else might be? Could it be that the systems analysis is on the right track?
Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of <X> who is capable of changing things for not doing so.".
For example, the 2022 Halloween Crushing incident in Seoul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Halloween_crowd_crush?wp...
Whose "fault" was it? If we had a quantum supercomputer and video from every angle I bet we could calculate the first person to panic and start running. Have we successfully de-obfuscated the situation and found our culprit? I'm not sure, after all, two people away was a person about to panic as well, in fact they would have in exactly 2 seconds after the first person if the first person hadn't... In fact everyone on the crowd was on edge and on the verge of panic, hence why the crush was able to happen at all. So in that sense it's not really obfuscation to do a systems analysis on crowd dynamics to figure out why the crush happened.
And now hold on, whether we want to blame the individual that kicked off the panic or everyone in the crowd for not keeping their cool, is it fair, reasonable, or accurate to assign blame? These people hopped on a train and went to a Halloween party - surely it's reasonable to expect that on such a day, crowd control measures would be in place to keep them safe. After all, society keeps them safe from other things they don't really need to worry about - separating cars and pedestrians, keeping the water clean, flushing away their poo. Isn't it reasonable for them to assume that roads would be designed wide enough to accommodate a lot of people? That there'd be multiple exits? If so, then it's the fault of the bar for not communicating the tight pedestrian situation, or doing crowd limiting. Er, well, not just one bar, but the 20 that are in that area. Also the chief of police for not setting up proper crowd control, and the traffic commissioner for not instructing the chief to do so. Or mayor. Actually maybe the city planner for allowing such narrow areas to develop into popular bar areas at all. No not the city planner in 2022, the one in 1985 when they were rebuilding that area after the war.
I think especially in the western world there's a habit, maybe borne of western hyper individualism, to always try to find the individualist angle. "Well maybe people should take more personal responsibility for their safety!" And if people want to live that way I think they should be allowed to. Far away. Remotely, on farms or something lol. For those of us that prefer living more dense lifestyles in societies, I think it makes a lot more sense to take a systems analysis approach to these kinds of problems with reasonable good faith baked in.
Often it's not obfuscation, often situations simply are complicated to where it's impossible to blame the individual without contorting into strange value systems.
PS I for one do not blame anyone. If you enjoy something - that is not going to last forever.
> 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.
These guys wrote a custom server from scratch and have hacked up the original game itself as well. It's hosted completely by the community.
where can I read more about this?
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.
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?
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.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
This will never be required. An artist is free to keep their art for themselves and never make a copy.
Once an artist has distributed a copy however, the question becomes, why aren't other people free to do things they are capable of doing, like making additional copies?
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.
Extension of copyright is theft from the public domain in a way that non-commercial piracy has never and will never be.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy culture that I grew up on. It just makes copyright law a joke that people will reasonably ignore until it is less farcical. Oh no, boo hoo, they make a little bit less money; I’m over here playing (not a beloved game from my childhood, but) the world’s smallest violin in solidarity for the profits of the largest media conglomerate in the world.
Not trying to attack the above commenter but god damn am I sick of hearing how I should be paying money again to enjoy something I “““owned””” in my childhood. Fuck that every day of the week. I do not want to pay Nintendo to play Pokemon Red, I never will, and that is reasonable even if I choose to play it.
/rant
Nintendo, believe it or not, needs to make money. No money = no mario. And I like mario. And the seven seas likes mario, too. So that's not good for anyone.
There's a middle ground here, but in terms of messaging such middle ground is severely lacking.
Whenever DMCA let the C evolve into needs to be wiped cleaned and reset/rethought.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
Worse. Why do i need to chat with a character in a FPS ? This is not an RPG.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
On the other hand if you want a fun, borderline infringing clone of Battlefield 2042 give Delta Force a try. BF 2042 has about 8,000 daily players now, Delta Force 150,000. Clearly they are doing something right that EA could not with the last BF series entry.
Tarkov is probably the deepest / most engaging FPS of the last decade if not more, so I didn’t really consider its clone - EFTs greatness comes not from its extraction shooter formula but from the unprecedented attention to detail that puts GTA environments to shame. GTA has the macro at, let’s say “district scale” but EFT is unparalleled at street / house scale. It’s the first game where traversing levels makes me at least think about my actions in the context of real world navigation and not game navigation.
I think it’s thanks to: no map, the detailed design, and the fact that many areas are modeled after real locations. It really is quite crazy.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players. To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable. The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense. So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge. But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
Maybe I'm just older, but none of this seems fun.
Or you can choose to play StarCraft or chess or something where the rules are basically frozen at this point. Much better ROI on learning these kinds of games than something like Dota.
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
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...
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
It was more of a monoculture.
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.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
https://github.com/magefree/mage https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
The same is true for new ones. Since the barrier to create games is way lower than in the past, more games are created today leading to even more games dying and fading away. Newer successful games will be remastered and rebooted for as long as there is a business case for it.
This article could be an SAT question prompt.
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
* https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
Is that the one you used?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/13240/Unreal_Tournament_G...
>Server Hosting and LAN play
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
This is part of the reason, I think, Nintendo games seem to have more soul. The consoles are limited and, in turn, Nintendo dedicates more effort to make their games look stylistically good. Mario Odyssey doesn't have great graphics, but it looks fantastic. Ditto for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile, Concord, Battlefield, COD... they all kind of blend together.
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
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...
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
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.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user.
The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore.
Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog.
MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
No it's not. Game Pass is very popular even with people like me who are massive fans of Steam. And it's been pretty successful for quite a few years now, so not sure what you mean by "trying to"
Steam is for collectors who want to pretend that someday they’ll play their backlog.
At least digital hoarding is easier for the kids to throw away.
sadly true, it's almost comical how all other major game company can't seem to grasp why steam is so successful.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
(Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
Changes nothing about what I said. Plenty of very good multiplayer games out there.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-d...
yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming
AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued.
Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time.
Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before making a generalized comment about everything.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
Some times are better than others, and I can't tell whether we're in a lull or I just have a case of "getting older" and "kids these days". ;)
I will say that golden ages are typically identified retrospectively. Things get better until they get worse, and then you look back. Like the article, I certainly look back to the 90s as a golden age in gaming in certain ways, but at the time I didn't think that. At the time, I just thought everything was awesome and there was no reason for the party to ever end. What feels like that now?
Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:
"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.
Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
Lots of old games died.
I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video:
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
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...
There is an 8GB version of the 9060. Perfectly suitable option for the majority of gamers around the world.
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
But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
There are a gazillion indie masterpieces out there, go play!
Game design has improved dramatically in the last 20 years, enjoy that.
And AAA publishers don't want to admit it, but gameplay trumps graphics. If I want to see something that looks like real life, I go outside.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
There are absolutely incredible games still being made across genres. BG3, Hades, Clair Obscur, Celeste, the Horizon series, Balatro, Void Stranger, Elden Ring, these are all examples of all time great games in their respective genres and they all came out in the last 10 years.
> Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties
Final Fantasy XI is still around and it's been going for over 20 years. WoW and FFXIV are as well. You can quibble over what "modern" means, but WoW and FFXIV are still getting full expansions and even FFXI got new content as recently as 2023.
> Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Some have, but there are absolutely games that have not fallen into this trap.
It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts from such an unserious place
There’s still new things to build.
~6000 on Farmer :)
Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter".
Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios.
Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing.
That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games?
Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day.
There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
2. I thought they might be talking about design decisions that make for "lasting fun" but really they're advocating for design decisions that afford the game being functioning software without the corporate entity which produced it continuing to breathe life (and money) into it.
I think it's fine that things die. Also my god that first line is a flaming hot take.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.