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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without install etc.

There's quite a few ports to the browser running around, though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.

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.

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.

"of its time"

Counterstrike was the defining game for a subgenre of tactical shooters, of which you can see that Valorant is a member.

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.

Descent and Quake were both 3D shooters and DOS games, and Halo came out a year earlier with "better graphics"; CS was neither the first 3D shooter nor the first Windows game in its genre. Also, the first Counter-Strike was not a completely new game -- it used a modified Half-Life engine (which itself was built on the Quake engine).

Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.

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.

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.

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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.

There were also lots of exceptionally popular games that didn't survive simply because subsequent games were simply better. One example there would be Street Fighter 2. So the difference is that I'm arguing that games have staying power based on their overall quality, not their quality for a given era. When they're reasonably objectively surpassed, they tend to die off. If they doesn't happen, they tend to stick around.

This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.

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.

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).

The main difference with the newer version is better graphics, but that comes at the expense of minimum specs, loading time, etc.

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.

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.

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

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