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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025 because the market allows for it. If you can commoditize nostalgia, people who really should not be paying you money will gladly do so.

How many of us have more games in our Steam libraries, bought during a sale ("It was only $7, how could I resist?!") than we could reasonably hope to enjoy in a human lifetime? How many Game Pass subscriptions are actively used vs. just forgotten about and drawing revenue on auto-renew and autopay? How many people regularly comment online about how anti-consumer Nintendo has gotten with their IP lawsuits and remastered game sales, only to gladly preorder those same games on the new console?

Vote with your wallet.

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My nostalgia levels and annoyance of modern remakes market finally made me to buy Windows 98 machine and spend £5 per original CD on eBay with games I wanted to re-experience.

> Video gaming is the mess that it is in 2025

Is it though? IMO video gaming is fine, in a great spot, even. Consumer prices have stayed (unreasonably!) cheap for decades and especially the indie market is thriving right now. I remember paying more for games 15 years ago than I do now.

But I primarily play indie titles on Steam (currently Silksong), so that might warp my perspective.

Regarding commoditized nostalgia: I don't think pricing is that unreasonable. For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.

> For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.

Terrible example IMO. Microsoft has both disabled new purchases of "traditional" Age of Empires 2 on Steam and also spitefully patched out offline LAN play.

So when I can get enough people together about once a year to have a LAN party and we want to play AoE2 it's either everybody pays $35 each for the "definitive" edition, so we can play for just a couple hours, or else we just don't play it at all because not everybody even has a Steam account never mind their own gaming computer. And Steam also nuked the ability to buy multiple copies of a game when it's on sale and keep them to give as gifts later.

To compound this, because I only own the old edition (that nobody can buy anymore) and not the new one, I can't even leave a negative review (where it will actually be seen) warning people of Microsoft's shitty behavior.

I'm sure there's a torrent for that

Indie's great. It's what things should be. But the things that put bread on tables for the industry as a whole, that's just monetized to all hell at this point.

I'd argue that recreational products (which video games very much are) should remain unreasonably cheap. I get screwed on every other aspect of existence, the thing that I use for an escape shouldn't replicate this.

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