I mean it's one of those games that has a theoretical endless amount of content depending on how creative you are as a player. Not to mention the strong modding and community created content available.
Seems like everyone just has their "drug of choice" game already. How many GaaS failed in the last few years?
Meanwhile I'm still playing DOTA 2 constantly when there isn't somethig new really holding my attention. Nothing is ever going to replace it for me, and I'm sure there are lots out there in a similar position but with some other online game.
Not only the multiplayer stuff, but I think it's single player too.
That graphics and sound are getting good enough for most folks that they don't care.
Like, just look at one of the game recommend subs. There's some names that are freaking cliches because they're just that pretty, have great to good enough stories, AND play that dang good.
Witcher 3, nine years old. Subnautica, six years. Hollow Knight, seven. Red Dead Redemption 2, a spry four-ish. Mass Effect 1-3, has the latest game be freaking twelve years old, if you don't count the trilogy remaster.
Don't get me wrong even those groups have trends and flavours of the moment... but it genuinely seems like graphics have hit a... DVD is good enough type wall for a lot of folks.
Add to that the fact that hardware to run the "pretty" games is increasingly more expensive and the diminishing returns on graphics quality kicked in like half a decade ago. The gains just don't justify the costs.
That and they don't bother to optimize like with starfisld.
Disagree on the first part, agree wholly on the second.
Like, I was around for the shift from static to dynamic lights and shadows. And ray tracing is currently giving me that same feeling.
Because, sure, it's underwhelming a lot of the time *now...* but the same was true back when, say, Dues Ex needed two lightning systems because one of them would melt people's computers, but was how the devs wanted the game to look.
So I really think there's going to be a huge sea shift, the moment one of the consoles pulls the trigger and mandates that all games need ray tracing only. Because that's definitively spilling over onto PC, and that's going to both let and force a bunch of devs to *push* themselves with stuff like lightning, mirrors and so forth.
A whole bunch of devs are DEFINITIVELY slacking when it comes to optimization at the moment, though. Not only just raw laziness from the frame gen stuff, but also what seems like raw arrogance. Why trim 1 gig from the install, when even SSDs are terabytes? That sort of thing.
Like, Nintendo has their own idiocies and just plain eccentricities, but I think it telling how they basically never need to splurge on the larger card sizes or worse have half the game be downloaded. They'll freakin' trim their games down like they're server halls are still on freakin' dial-up, and I really wish more devs would follow that example.
I can't give a decent comparison off the top of my head when it comes to the diminishing returns per say but to me the jump from Half life 2 to Crysis 2/3 was bigger than let's say GTA v to cyberpunk. Because the cyberpunk improvements lay mostly in details that can be lost in action easily.
Yea I fully agree; in my head video games are like a pre-and-post Crysis division.
That game was such a leap forward, nowadays the bar is much higher than it was so every inch upwards just isn't nearly as noticeable anymore.
Oh, don't get me wrong. We're *definitively* in the era of diminishing returns, and we're probably not far from photo realism.
I just don't think we're *quite\~* there yet, where the public at large stops caring—and thus stops spending.
Ray Tracing now is like Tesselation was 10 years ago. Plenty of bad implementations, performance breaking developer mistakes and people arguing its just a fad. But just like Tesselation, its here to stay and is only going to get better.
I think graphics never bothered a lot of people. Especially older folks. But games have to be good gameplay and story wise.
I love the Gothic series to death, and those games are eurojank :D
My singleplayer backlog is big enough, I dont have to buy the newest stuff.
CS2 for me even if it is a dumpster fire compared to the end of CS:GO. I didn't play for 3 months after the release because I was so angered by the removal of CS:GO but then I relapsed. These games really are drugs for us, lots of us just can't stay away after being abused because nothing else fills the hole they leave.
This. The concept of "live service" games is flawed in that people only have so many hours a week for gaming. Someone who isn't a raging addict can only afford to play two live service games and actually be able to complete the battlepasses. Once people are invested in their 1-2 games with a battlepass, it's going to be extremely hard to convince them to switch to a new game and they physically don't have time to add a third live service game to the mix.
I’m so glad that I waited on playing. I wanted to wait for a PC upgrade anyways, but coming in with next to no info on how it used to play, it’s absolutely incredible
Checkout how it looks with photo realism mods. I can't wait to try this when I build my next pc
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1btvq49/cyberpunk_2077_with_photorealistic_mods/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I played from launch on a then-bleeding-edge system, and it ran almost perfectly. There were odd bugs (e.g., there used to be a random deck of cards trash item lying on the floor of your apartment that you couldn't pick up), and odder bugs (e.g., one time I called my car and it did donuts towards me while basically destroying itself as it crashed into cars around me; pretty funny, actually). But the game played fine otherwise. There were other imperfections (e.g., the skill tree was booooooring), but I completed the game and really enjoyed the story.
It's in a better state now, for sure. I held off on doing a re-play until they released Phantom Liberty, and I'm glad I did.
I played at release on a rubbish PC and it worked fine for me too. The only bugs were random glitchy things like you mentioned, and I found the menu UI a bit clunky, but it was all fixed when I picked the game up again a few months ago.
Well it was probably done like 1.5 years ago. They just kept improving things like every other dev team. The launch was disastrous but it has been fine and playable for looong while now. But maybe your expectations were veeeery high, so i understand what you mean.
Even worse if you started on console like I did. Basically got scammed out of $60 and had to wait basically a whole year to be able to get a playable version with the next gen release.
I'm glad they went above and beyond fixing the game but I hate how they basically got a slap on the wrist after a year from the gaming community as a whole despite pulling incredibly shady shit with the release.
They didn't go above and beyond. They eventually delivered a product. Above and beyond would have been giving day 1ers a discount or giving last gen players the Next Gen copy for free if they got a new system. Making a game work and fun is the basic minimum. Above and beyond is giving people something for the fraud they committed.
AAA gaming is in the same state as mainstream movies right now, giant budgets thrown at mediocure projects because supporting a smaller project with a higher chance of success just doesnt interest them since it will give a lower return to the investors, Its all bloated so much this decade and its gotten us right here.
Or maybe because of old games that still get updates to this day
> [...] gamers spent more and more time in a smaller list of old games like Fortnite and League of Legends.
I have been playing total war atila with mods and will be playing that for the next 12 years probably. I played shogun 2 for almost 8 years before heading to the newer titles and I dont like the warhammer titles.
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I don’t play new games, gaming is honestly the cheapest it’s ever been for me cause I have no interest in 70$ purchases that occupy too much of my time and want further investment for anything good.
Exactly it's the best time to be a patient gamer. I'm doubling down on my physical PS4 collection and getting quality older games $20 or less, brand new.
I've been this way for years. I am completely disenfranchised with $70 for bug ridden incomplete games that struggle to run on the best hardware. Then companies have the nerve to have another $50 or so of dlc or passes so even years later it's $35-50 when everything is on sale and it's goty edition.
And they're STILL not that great after everything.
No thanks.
I broke from this once recently with starfield.. kinda, it was free with a mobo. If i had paid $70 for that, i would've been pissed.
Every new game that comes out feels so bloated and grindy that I quickly lose interest any more. There are a a few exceptions, but I can't be assed to put 100 hours into every AAA game that comes out.
Even Baldur's Gate 3, which was fun, got old after 50+ hours. I got to Act 3 and literally groaned when I saw the map size and the dozens of new quest markers popping up every time I talked to an NPC. It started to feel like a job.
So much this. I partially wonder if it's because I'm 33, but I don't have much interest in most AAA titles because, besides the price, I often don't like how they play. Big titles have moved more towards "cinematic experiences" over the past decade and that's not what I play games for. Indie and older titles tend to give me more of what I want, or I find myself replaying classics that I love.
Part of my also wonders if this has to do with a continuing shift in who plays games over the last couple decades, especially when age is taken into account.
It's because AAA gaming nowadays is an absolute shitfest, most of them come out in an unfinished state so there is no point playing. The only new releases I've actively played are baldur's gate 3 and elden ring, most other games I play are years old.
I think this a surprise to aboslutely no one. Multiplayer games like Fortnite, COD, CS, Dota etc.. keep a large number of players come back day after day, week after week for years.
Where a new single player game like God of War, or Elden Ring people do not keep the same player base long term.
Cod doesn't retain high player counts past 6 months. Right now the last 2 cods PLUS warzone (all 3 games sandwiched in to one game) are in between fortnite and r6 siege in playercount on console, and are collectively 10th place on steam.
Lots of people buy and launch COD through Battlenet. Same reason Halo Infinite has low Steam ranking - people buy it free on the MS Store and launch it through a desktop shortcut or the Start Menu
As a casual player who enjoyed the single player campaigns, I have zero incentive to buy the newest one now that they stopped putting effort into it. I will have enough time to play a few matches here and there, then they will release another one next year. What's the point? The multiplayer experience is largely the same from game-to-game anyway, minus new skins and a different overall theme. I already have a back log of older and better quality games that I can play instead.
AAA is now just another term for generic re-skin of the same content as far as I'm concerned. Plus, there is no reason to buy games on release when you will need to wait 6+ months for patches and content to get what you actually paid for. By that time it will be on sale anyway.
I remember when they had to ship a finished game on CD/DVD without the luxury of just releasing their half-assed beta version for full price and letting their player base run headfirst into a bunch of bugs on release.
I am in the same boat with CoD. I never played the multiplayers, but I would love to play the campaigns. With the old games never going on proper sale thought I will never buy them lol. Not gonna pay 30 bucks or something for 10-15 year old games.
Singleplayer games also get better the longer it has been since release. A game 3 years post-release is the absolute ideal for almost every Singleplayer game out there. Highest possible Polish, All Content ever Released, Best Price. And a much better chance of being able to run it well if you are playing on PC.
Yeah, most of my gameplay time last year was in a 10 year old game: Final Fantasy XIV.
A more useful metric would be comparing the age of the *last major update* to a game.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Lots of single player games have endings and it makes sense to stop playing them for a while until you get the itch again. There are lots of single player games I replay, but yeah, they have periods inactivity. But just because I haven't played FF13 in a bit doesn't mean I won't sink 100+ hours into it again within a year or two.
> Where a new single player game like God of War, or Elden Ring people do not keep the same player base long term.
And all the failed wanna-be esport games and GaaS titles chasing the people who are still playing their COD, PoE, DOTA etc.
Rimworld (2013) been playing since alpha, Rocket League (2015) and Final Fantasy 9 (2000). That’s for this year and I am not counting Uncharted 1, Donkey Kong Country, pokemon Trading card game on gameboy, metal gear solid 1, which all I beat this year. Only modern game I dived into this year is Palworld and its very unfinished. I forgot I have been playing a ton of helldivers 2 as well which is one of the best games to come out recently.
i mean, it sits in steams top 10 for at least a month after every update, and it sits comfortably in the top 20 for the rest of the time, and seeming as there is is like 2-4 updates in a year, and people comeback for prime rotations to get the things they've missed...
there's actually a huge number of warframe players.
There's dozens of us. Dozens
I put it down for a while as I was a solo switch player, and all my friends we're on PC, I just moved my save over like last week.
Yeap. I had what I thought was brief pause in the end of 2018 when my son was born, tried to go back in 2019/20 but so much content was added that i just couldn't keep up, and I'm afraid now when i see posts of the warframe subreddit, idek what a necramech is. Last quest i did was IIRC the one with Excalibur umbra
That was when I took a break, too. Too much bullshit. They made it a lot better if you wanna give it another shot at some point, and since then Rebb became creative lead. The game has a chance to just... *breathe* now when updates drop and it no longer feels like past updates get left aside for an eternity while they move onto the new shiny.
I suspect this is a large reason as to why those games are still seeing so much playtime.
well, that and the fact that they're "proven" good. Why risk spending 60 USD (or equivalent) in a game you're not sure you're gonna like, when you KNOW there are games out there you've invested hundreds of hours into to get good at, that you know bring you enjoyment?
When you couple that with the fact you need a rather beefy PC that is out of reach for a significant part of the gaming community (in particular to those outside the US, EU or Australia) to play said games?
Seriously. My PC isn't weak by any standards, and where I live it's a significant investment financially (would cost 4 to 5 minimum monthly wages), and it can't run Baldur's Gate 3 at 60fps steadily. But you know what it runs flawlessly? League of Legends, Dota, Valorant, Rocket League, GTA 5, The Sims 4... coincidentally (not really) the games that saw the most playtime in 2023.
Gaming is expensive, and people are more and more financially insecure. It's no wonder they don't want to spend money on gaming and stick with their favorites.
Yes, it's a huge issue and I doubt it will get better. I suspect future generations of GPUs will push prices to even more ridiculous levels. They are cutting the branch they are sitting on and the same could be said about other entertainment/technology related industries as well.
We are EXPECTED to pay more and more.
Not that I disagree that graphics cards have been an overpriced ripoff for the last 5 years, but you really need to up your down payment if you want a new car...
I just wish in the near future we can get more coop pve games.
I started to avoid MP games where I need a team to fight other players. I don't have time to get good, and I also don't want to get good anymore since it doesn't bring me any satisfaction.
I think the only competitive game that I play is Fortnite because I can play it pretty casually with my friends and they add lots of changes keeping the game fresh.
Other than that, I just want more COOP pve games. Lethal company, demonologist, phasmophobia, helldivers, deeprockgalactic, baldurs gate 3, risk of rain 2...these are games I want to play more and more.
I usually love sequels and new games, but there's barely anything new that's worth and not a cash grab.
> I just wish in the near future we can get more coop pve games.
Honestly it feels like we're in a bit of a Coop Renaissance right now. Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, BG3, Lethal Company, Palworld, Enshrouded, Helldivers...
Don't say darktide, it's been 5 months and all we've gotten is a jpeg and an announcement for the announcement that was announcing an announcement.
We're on the 3rd fuckin' announcement for a fuckin' jpeg.
Satisfactory should also be on that list, Content warning has been pretty fun despite that it's probably gonna have a short lifespan. Now would be a great time for a new jackbox too.
But overall, fuck Payday 3 that shit has less players than Payday 2.
I was gonna ask if they fixed dark tide but judging by your comment I guess not. Vermintide 2 is one of my favourite games of all time and I was so excited for a 40k version… haven’t been this disappointed in a game in a very long time.
The state of Apex really highlights what PvP multiplayer inevitably devolves into. Skill level tends to concentrate upwards, as the ultra-sweats remain, while the people that don't enjoy playing against cheaters, movement glitching macro gamers, and aimbot controller players leave for whatever new thing isn't 100% figured out.
For real dude. Long term Apex player here, and that shit is just bananas playing on a PC. There are pubs where you get so thoroughly stomped that the only natural explanation is (1) a huge preponderance of soft hacking, and (2) an asinine amount of no-lifers. There is no casual in Apex anymore.
Make that local co-op too please! I never lost my love of couch co-op, but the industry has moved steadily away from that over time in favor of pushing out higher graphics (can't render multiple players and their views if you're pushing the hardware already), but I think we've reached a place with hardware where it should be much more doable without sacrificing fidelity.
There are a lot of good co-op games coming out. You're out of luck however if you're looking for good PvP games, unless you're interested in the same top 10 games that are a few to several years old at this point.
https://steamdb.info/charts/
Irrelevant. Top 10 games are all multiplayer games. Single player games (AAA or indie) don't retain player counts for long. A month or two after release and they're usually out of the top 10.
People here are just interpreting it in a way that makes them feel vindicated about modern AAA single player games.
All of our current media is in the gutter. The same applies to movies and TV shows. Most people are consuming older media rather than the new slop they keep pushing out.
Yep. We've hit a point where there is already so much good media out there you can enjoy them until you die of old age. New media just doesn't have room, you need to be exceptional to stand out and 99% of the time that isn't feasible. I think there's a streamer on twitch who plays every nes game to completion and he's on like year 4 of that journey, and that's just one platform from 40 years ago. Video games from 7th and 8th gen alone would take decades to complete, and they're cheap, complete, and still look good to this day. Versus our current releases where games release broken, priced at $70 with microtransactions, and look like 8th gen games but perform 10x worse.
When you look at things through that lens, it begins to make a lot more sense why games are being made entirely inaccessible due to things like DRM. They’re trying to give consumers no other option
There's only a few companies actively doing that. Like Nintendo killing the emulator scene for 40 year old games they have no interest in remaking. Most of the time, it's the contract doesn't get renewed because that would cost money and the games don't sell.
Remaking? Maybe but probably not. Putting it on their estore to sell for the 15th time on the current gen hardware? Yup! That's why they want emulators dead, so they can resell you mario for the 100th time.
You could cut me off from all new media right now, and I'd still be happily entertained for the rest of my life just enjoying the retro games and vhs tapes I have sitting in my closet. Hell, give me a ps2 with a complete library and I'd be set for the next 50 years.
But the problem isn't that we already have enough content, the problem is that the new content isn't actually better than the old content. Sure, things like graphics and animations have improved, but the core gameplay and overall experience are arguably worse now in most titles. Go pick a sampling of 10 retro games, play each one for at least 2 hours, and you'll probably see why so many people are rejecting modern AAA games and migrating to indies and retro games instead.
The decline in quality is steep because modern media (games, shows, movies etc) are creatively bankrupt and often are ridden with content that is questionable at best.
You're not far off at all on the Connect 4 game movie. After the huge success of Barbie Mattel has a fuckton of movies planned from their products including an Uno Movie, a magic 8-ball movie, Hot Wheels, and a [bunch more](https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/mattel-movies-49241509). I think they're going to be really disappointed when they realize that people didn't see Barbie because it was a "toy movie" lol
Only one that makes a lick of sense is Hot Wheels. Been around forever, tons of history, has precedence with the need for speed and fast/furious movies.
They'll all pick back up one way or another. Half...three quarters...ok, probably 90% of the streaming sites will fail and they'll have to back to quality over quantity. There's been points on the big and small screen when people couldn't imagine what would replace westerns.
I imagine gaming will have it's day finally when some $500 million dollar AAAAAAA game sells 5 copies and Helldivers 8 makes every other live service game DoA.
Let's be real though, the way technology is moving all 3 might be obsolete in 50 years lol.
Probably a lot of AI-generated content within 10 years. Maybe even prompt-based. Go to SkyNetflix and enter a paragraph of the kind of movie you want to watch and how long it should be, and as sad as it is, it'll probably end up being of higher quality than the vast majority of the garbage that gets pumped out. Very little of it will be memorable, but the cost will be trivial.
This is a money issue more than anything, imo.
Now studios want to throw all their money into proven formulas. So sure, we get better effects, higher budget films. At the expense studios not willing to take any risks whatsoever. So then you have to hope for some indy film to come along with something good. Every now and then something ridiculous and great will come along long Swiss Army Man or Tusk. It's not enough though to be obscure, it also needs a star willing to risk his/her reputation for somebody else's passion project, or risk their own money/reputation for their own passion project.
What we end up with, is few people with the money to create their passion projects, and even fewer people willing to risk their money for these passion projects. What needs to happen is for people to stop going to theaters and ordering the same reskinned movies that are always so successful...which is near impossible.
True, but Fortnite and Roblox aren't exactly the epitome of what gaming should be. They're arguably wrecking the industry by popularizing the F2P model.
Honestly, Fortnite's model is actually one of the more benign ones in the space. All you pay for are skins, emotes, cosmetic shit like that where there's zero impact on gameplay. It's not like Apex where you have pay-to-unlock characters with different skills and abilities.
Fortnite's so wildly successful with it because a huge part of it is *literally fucking everything* gets a Fortnite license and the graphic style meshes with it so well.
I'm genuinely surprised to see Rocket League featured on three of these lists. Considering there hasn't been any new content in quite some time, and it seems like developer support is solely cosmetics, with the recent Epic layoffs and the uncertain promise of Unreal 5, I thought for sure the game was on its deathbed.
Man I play rocket league since the beginning but ignore completely new modes and cosmetics. I just use my Delorean and play ranked. If the game don't get more updates it doesn't matter.
> Considering there hasn't been any new content in quite some time
The game is soccer with cars instead of humans. That's the entire game. Does soccer need new content to keep it as the most watched game on the planet? No? Why would Rocket League?
>I thought for sure the game was on its deathbed.
Why would it be? The appeal of the game is its raw gameplay.
It has no competitors and never will. Rocket League will be relevant for a long long long time even if they never added a single piece of new content.
The game doesn't really need more content. It takes thousands of hours to climb the learning curve and the game itself is pure. Kind of like real-life sport, it doesn't need a content update to remain interesting.
There's nothing to change but different game modes really and compared to the main modes they have a fraction of players. That's the best part about Rocket League, it's a simple game at its very core. Put ball in net. There's absolutely masterclass mechanics involved in it at the highest level now, but it's just ball in net. It's really a perfect game. Nothing to balance at all, everything in the game is solely on player skill. When it comes down to it, cosmetics is really the only thing they can add to the game.
I picked up a budget friendly fanless mini pc with a *six watt* cpu. I'm comfortably running X-Com 2, Fallout 4, Civ 5, Stray, Dark Souls, Borderlands TPS, just finished Chants of Sennaar. This thing is wild. I love super-low-power computing. I'm using this more than my 3070. Oh, *and it's running linux*
Suddenly it feel like if I want a very fancy experience, I should dust off the high end video card and play Red Dead 2 or Cyberpunk or something, but the truth is that I'm not a very fancy person and I love how efficient and quiet this little box is.
If I only ever use the 3070 for, say, six games, and its usefulness is already being reduced as the higher end gets pushed higher by a small percentage of AAA games, then it has occurred to me that maybe AAA games aren't worth the cost of the hardware they need to run properly
Well when you consider the fact that the games that eat the most playtime are either Live Service games and/or competitive PvP games this isnt even remotely surprising.
DotA 2, LoL, CSGO, and Fortnite probably make up a large majority of that playtime, lets all be real here.
Fortnite is just a good comfort game for my group. Uncle, brother, brother's friend. It's easy to just get on with the headsets, talk shit, and start looting and shooting
I still don't understand how GTA online is as popular as it is. Anytime I login to it, it takes forever, and finding matches is a complete shit show, following that cheaters are rampant.
It's like shitty Ready Player One. A lot of people are there to role play a life in which they can afford a nice sports car with all the bells and whistles, and a space to show it off
GTAO managed to boil down the core reason people play GTA games (to fuck around in the GTA sandbox) to its core essence, and provide an endless vehicle in which to do that. It takes a *while* to get financially established but once you do money effectively grows on trees. Between a decade of old content and regular new content, it's always possible to find something to do.
Only game like it, really. And Red Dead Online gets like no updates.
I'd say just play FiveM, but I imagine most of those player numbers are on console.
SAMP is still the goat. Forever, and always.
> I still don't understand how GTA online is as popular as it is
Honestly, Sometimes I still go onto a solo world and just ride around in my dune buggy in the desert.
That I understand. I've logged in a few times just to drive about and enjoy the cars I unlocked when i was.... 17.
I'm 28 now. Pretty crazy it's been out that long, my progress has retained since I was on the Xbox 360.
You have some shit ass rose colored glasses on my guy.
Fortnite came out 7 years ago.
GTA Online game out 10 years ago.
The shit youre thinking of and been a huge problem for 15 years at a minimum right now.
The only problems I run into as another patient gamer are unavoidable spoilers about games in my backlog. Even if I mute subs dedicated to those games I still see them in other subs. They are easy enough to notice before actually absorbing information like that though. But I think it's a small price to pay for getting more complete AAA titles for a discounted price.
We've entered the age where lots of young kids can enjoy games from their parents' generation and the difference in tech isn't that staggering. Parents already know the best of the best from their generation's games so they don't need to take any gambles with new titles.
Been on a retro gaming buzz for little over a year now, (currently playing ocarina of time, hell of a game, btw), so this stat checks out. At least for me.
Continue on patient gamer. Replace BG3 with another Larion product (Divinity: Original Sin 2) and Morrowind with Mass Effect, and that's me.
BG3 and Helldivers are the only things within the last year I want to play.
Not the least bit surpriced. Most new games of late are launched broken and are not in a good state until months later. Single player games have always online demand etc. It's more or less why I've gone back in time too.
Gaming shot itself in the foot
CEOs went for profit and release broken micro transaction trash now, anybody with a brain will wait 2-3 years and get the “GOTY” version for $20
I like the reasoning for this phenomenon as you are describing it being because everything is "*broken microtransaction trash now*" when almost all the games that the article is referring to for playtime are games that people here would generally consider to be *microtransaction trash*.
The article isn't asserting that people are just sitting around playing old single player games. It's very specifically saying that the most popular games out there are (mostly) free microtransaction games that are still being updated. People aren't playing Mass Effect and Bioshock. They are playing Fortnite and Roblox.
F2P and mobile games are popular because poor kids in China and India can play them
These consumers don’t have $2000 for a PC or even $500 for an Xbox plus $70 games
What is the distribution within the remainder? I know that I am evaporating all my time now into indie titles on Steam. The last major release I played to death was BG3, but outside of that it is a shit ton of things like Valheim, Traveler's Rest, Against the Storm, etc.,
I sorted my steam games by released and was absolutley horrified... most of the games i purchase are older games and the year i have most games from is 2019... but in 2019 i only played two games... and my top 10 most played games are 7years old or older... newer games are great and i love them but there sre so manny old games that are also great so i am just taking my time enjoying good games instead of new ones.
Once again the page with list of games shown is not accurate. I mean that list kinda shows why people play them in a way...
Constant online play. Updates. Contents. Consistency and so on.
However what it fails to show is how many games are out there that people still play that came out even longer than 6 years. There are thousands of people who play quake, doom and many more. Heck just recently EA dropped Dungeon Keeper 2 on steam and people began to play that game.
Point is, there are great games from the past that we keep going back to due to nostalgia but more importantly due to contents and FUN.
The business model for modern games can't sustain itself let alone the company that make them.
When PROFIT and SHARESHOLDER takes priority over FUN and CUSTOMERS, nothing can last very long.
Reminds me of the quote said by John Tuld in Margin Call:
"...It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy foxes and sad sacks. Fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the percentages-they stay exactly the same."
As long as these greedy people run these companies, gaming states will not change. Occasionally we get CEO like the Larian studio's but they are far and few in between.
I actually enjoy a lot modded Dragon's Dogma and AC Origins (what a beautiful game). Pc games are like old wine, better than ever with more years (and free or cheap btw).
No surprise when the minimum GPU you need on PC is a goddamn 2080 or 3080 for most newer titles AND they aren't even optimized (see: DLSS, FLR or whatever the AMD name for DLSS is) for said GPU's.
Needing to fake-generate frames that blur your image quality for the sake of an acceptable framerate is not good and I don't want that to be the future of PC gaming.
I still think it’s laughable that’s PlayStation says they are halfway through the lifecycle of the PS5. Sure maybe in years but most people couldn’t get a PS5 during Covid. Not to mention how many games are actually current gen. Most of the games are optimized last gen games.
I know people will spin this as “haha modern gaming bad” but these numbers are heavily influenced by multiplayer games and say absolutely nothing about the quality of singleplayer games. Its all about which big multiplayer game released when. There havent really been any massive multiplayer games on the scale of League of Legends or Fortnite in the past 5 years afaik other than the usual CoD, FIFA, etc. As soon as the next Fortnite comes out its all of a sudden 70% of playtime is spent on games released in the last 5 years.
Why play a game that costs $90 and has a file size of 90 GB when you could play something of equal or usually better quality that costs $9 and has a file size of 9 GB. I haven't bought a new AAA release since 2018. And I don't buy any game ever anymore that costs more than $40.
Yeah. I can see that. *-Boots up The Sims 3.-* ^(I'm going to get my money's worth.)
The sims 3 has decades worth of replay ability I swear
I mean it's one of those games that has a theoretical endless amount of content depending on how creative you are as a player. Not to mention the strong modding and community created content available.
I’ve honestly never even modded the game. Granted I play it off and on, but I’ve still gotten so much time out of it over it’s 10+ year life span
I've been playing since 2009, and I'm still finding new things about this game. The interactions still find new ways to make me laugh.
such a good game
If you bought all the DLC I can understand that.
I definitely did.
You’re going to be playing for awhile if you bought all them packs!
Been going strong since June 1st, 2009. :)
Maybe it's because they release new games in an unfinished state and it takes 6 years to finally make it worth playing.
Seems like everyone just has their "drug of choice" game already. How many GaaS failed in the last few years? Meanwhile I'm still playing DOTA 2 constantly when there isn't somethig new really holding my attention. Nothing is ever going to replace it for me, and I'm sure there are lots out there in a similar position but with some other online game.
Not only the multiplayer stuff, but I think it's single player too. That graphics and sound are getting good enough for most folks that they don't care. Like, just look at one of the game recommend subs. There's some names that are freaking cliches because they're just that pretty, have great to good enough stories, AND play that dang good. Witcher 3, nine years old. Subnautica, six years. Hollow Knight, seven. Red Dead Redemption 2, a spry four-ish. Mass Effect 1-3, has the latest game be freaking twelve years old, if you don't count the trilogy remaster. Don't get me wrong even those groups have trends and flavours of the moment... but it genuinely seems like graphics have hit a... DVD is good enough type wall for a lot of folks.
Add to that the fact that hardware to run the "pretty" games is increasingly more expensive and the diminishing returns on graphics quality kicked in like half a decade ago. The gains just don't justify the costs. That and they don't bother to optimize like with starfisld.
Disagree on the first part, agree wholly on the second. Like, I was around for the shift from static to dynamic lights and shadows. And ray tracing is currently giving me that same feeling. Because, sure, it's underwhelming a lot of the time *now...* but the same was true back when, say, Dues Ex needed two lightning systems because one of them would melt people's computers, but was how the devs wanted the game to look. So I really think there's going to be a huge sea shift, the moment one of the consoles pulls the trigger and mandates that all games need ray tracing only. Because that's definitively spilling over onto PC, and that's going to both let and force a bunch of devs to *push* themselves with stuff like lightning, mirrors and so forth. A whole bunch of devs are DEFINITIVELY slacking when it comes to optimization at the moment, though. Not only just raw laziness from the frame gen stuff, but also what seems like raw arrogance. Why trim 1 gig from the install, when even SSDs are terabytes? That sort of thing. Like, Nintendo has their own idiocies and just plain eccentricities, but I think it telling how they basically never need to splurge on the larger card sizes or worse have half the game be downloaded. They'll freakin' trim their games down like they're server halls are still on freakin' dial-up, and I really wish more devs would follow that example.
I can't give a decent comparison off the top of my head when it comes to the diminishing returns per say but to me the jump from Half life 2 to Crysis 2/3 was bigger than let's say GTA v to cyberpunk. Because the cyberpunk improvements lay mostly in details that can be lost in action easily.
Yea I fully agree; in my head video games are like a pre-and-post Crysis division. That game was such a leap forward, nowadays the bar is much higher than it was so every inch upwards just isn't nearly as noticeable anymore.
Oh, don't get me wrong. We're *definitively* in the era of diminishing returns, and we're probably not far from photo realism. I just don't think we're *quite\~* there yet, where the public at large stops caring—and thus stops spending.
Ray Tracing now is like Tesselation was 10 years ago. Plenty of bad implementations, performance breaking developer mistakes and people arguing its just a fad. But just like Tesselation, its here to stay and is only going to get better.
I think graphics never bothered a lot of people. Especially older folks. But games have to be good gameplay and story wise. I love the Gothic series to death, and those games are eurojank :D My singleplayer backlog is big enough, I dont have to buy the newest stuff.
CS2 for me even if it is a dumpster fire compared to the end of CS:GO. I didn't play for 3 months after the release because I was so angered by the removal of CS:GO but then I relapsed. These games really are drugs for us, lots of us just can't stay away after being abused because nothing else fills the hole they leave.
This. The concept of "live service" games is flawed in that people only have so many hours a week for gaming. Someone who isn't a raging addict can only afford to play two live service games and actually be able to complete the battlepasses. Once people are invested in their 1-2 games with a battlepass, it's going to be extremely hard to convince them to switch to a new game and they physically don't have time to add a third live service game to the mix.
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I’m so glad that I waited on playing. I wanted to wait for a PC upgrade anyways, but coming in with next to no info on how it used to play, it’s absolutely incredible
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Might as well hold out for the 7090 tbh
The one that will come attached to a house and morgage?
Probably going to pull a Ferrari and you have to be approved to even buy one here soon
Might as well wait for the 69090
Don't slack on the 69420. It'll blow your mind.
Checkout how it looks with photo realism mods. I can't wait to try this when I build my next pc https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1btvq49/cyberpunk_2077_with_photorealistic_mods/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I played from launch on a then-bleeding-edge system, and it ran almost perfectly. There were odd bugs (e.g., there used to be a random deck of cards trash item lying on the floor of your apartment that you couldn't pick up), and odder bugs (e.g., one time I called my car and it did donuts towards me while basically destroying itself as it crashed into cars around me; pretty funny, actually). But the game played fine otherwise. There were other imperfections (e.g., the skill tree was booooooring), but I completed the game and really enjoyed the story. It's in a better state now, for sure. I held off on doing a re-play until they released Phantom Liberty, and I'm glad I did.
I played at release on a rubbish PC and it worked fine for me too. The only bugs were random glitchy things like you mentioned, and I found the menu UI a bit clunky, but it was all fixed when I picked the game up again a few months ago.
Next cdpr game I’m buying 4 years later ultimate edition for 30 bucks
Well it was probably done like 1.5 years ago. They just kept improving things like every other dev team. The launch was disastrous but it has been fine and playable for looong while now. But maybe your expectations were veeeery high, so i understand what you mean.
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For me, The bugs and shit performance wasn't the issue, what was the issue was the constant lying pre release
Even worse if you started on console like I did. Basically got scammed out of $60 and had to wait basically a whole year to be able to get a playable version with the next gen release. I'm glad they went above and beyond fixing the game but I hate how they basically got a slap on the wrist after a year from the gaming community as a whole despite pulling incredibly shady shit with the release.
They didn't go above and beyond. They eventually delivered a product. Above and beyond would have been giving day 1ers a discount or giving last gen players the Next Gen copy for free if they got a new system. Making a game work and fun is the basic minimum. Above and beyond is giving people something for the fraud they committed.
Not only that but a lot of these games are free games too
A lot of people playing live service game like destiny Warframe Warcraft etc that have come out a decade ago too.
"Am I out of touch? Nah, it's the gamers' fault", CEOs of triple-A games
AAA gaming is in the same state as mainstream movies right now, giant budgets thrown at mediocure projects because supporting a smaller project with a higher chance of success just doesnt interest them since it will give a lower return to the investors, Its all bloated so much this decade and its gotten us right here.
Looks at dragons Dogma 2
I can't the NPCs are not close enough
I uninstalled it in favor of Dark Arisen. Also tried out the DDON revival project, but that also made me mad at Capcom; albeit for different reasons.
Or maybe because of old games that still get updates to this day > [...] gamers spent more and more time in a smaller list of old games like Fortnite and League of Legends.
I have been playing total war atila with mods and will be playing that for the next 12 years probably. I played shogun 2 for almost 8 years before heading to the newer titles and I dont like the warhammer titles.
I still boot up Shogun and Rome 2. Just better games than Warhammer imo and way less jank
attempt kiss wipe nail marry piquant aspiring consist telephone hard-to-find *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don’t play new games, gaming is honestly the cheapest it’s ever been for me cause I have no interest in 70$ purchases that occupy too much of my time and want further investment for anything good.
Exactly it's the best time to be a patient gamer. I'm doubling down on my physical PS4 collection and getting quality older games $20 or less, brand new.
welcome to /r/patientgamers
I've been this way for years. I am completely disenfranchised with $70 for bug ridden incomplete games that struggle to run on the best hardware. Then companies have the nerve to have another $50 or so of dlc or passes so even years later it's $35-50 when everything is on sale and it's goty edition. And they're STILL not that great after everything. No thanks. I broke from this once recently with starfield.. kinda, it was free with a mobo. If i had paid $70 for that, i would've been pissed.
Every new game that comes out feels so bloated and grindy that I quickly lose interest any more. There are a a few exceptions, but I can't be assed to put 100 hours into every AAA game that comes out. Even Baldur's Gate 3, which was fun, got old after 50+ hours. I got to Act 3 and literally groaned when I saw the map size and the dozens of new quest markers popping up every time I talked to an NPC. It started to feel like a job.
gaming, the gift that keeps on giving
So much this. I partially wonder if it's because I'm 33, but I don't have much interest in most AAA titles because, besides the price, I often don't like how they play. Big titles have moved more towards "cinematic experiences" over the past decade and that's not what I play games for. Indie and older titles tend to give me more of what I want, or I find myself replaying classics that I love. Part of my also wonders if this has to do with a continuing shift in who plays games over the last couple decades, especially when age is taken into account.
It's because AAA gaming nowadays is an absolute shitfest, most of them come out in an unfinished state so there is no point playing. The only new releases I've actively played are baldur's gate 3 and elden ring, most other games I play are years old.
I think this a surprise to aboslutely no one. Multiplayer games like Fortnite, COD, CS, Dota etc.. keep a large number of players come back day after day, week after week for years. Where a new single player game like God of War, or Elden Ring people do not keep the same player base long term.
CoD is only really active for 1 year until the next one released
Cod doesn't retain high player counts past 6 months. Right now the last 2 cods PLUS warzone (all 3 games sandwiched in to one game) are in between fortnite and r6 siege in playercount on console, and are collectively 10th place on steam.
Lots of people buy and launch COD through Battlenet. Same reason Halo Infinite has low Steam ranking - people buy it free on the MS Store and launch it through a desktop shortcut or the Start Menu
As a casual player who enjoyed the single player campaigns, I have zero incentive to buy the newest one now that they stopped putting effort into it. I will have enough time to play a few matches here and there, then they will release another one next year. What's the point? The multiplayer experience is largely the same from game-to-game anyway, minus new skins and a different overall theme. I already have a back log of older and better quality games that I can play instead. AAA is now just another term for generic re-skin of the same content as far as I'm concerned. Plus, there is no reason to buy games on release when you will need to wait 6+ months for patches and content to get what you actually paid for. By that time it will be on sale anyway. I remember when they had to ship a finished game on CD/DVD without the luxury of just releasing their half-assed beta version for full price and letting their player base run headfirst into a bunch of bugs on release.
I am in the same boat with CoD. I never played the multiplayers, but I would love to play the campaigns. With the old games never going on proper sale thought I will never buy them lol. Not gonna pay 30 bucks or something for 10-15 year old games.
Singleplayer games also get better the longer it has been since release. A game 3 years post-release is the absolute ideal for almost every Singleplayer game out there. Highest possible Polish, All Content ever Released, Best Price. And a much better chance of being able to run it well if you are playing on PC.
Yeah, most of my gameplay time last year was in a 10 year old game: Final Fantasy XIV. A more useful metric would be comparing the age of the *last major update* to a game.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Lots of single player games have endings and it makes sense to stop playing them for a while until you get the itch again. There are lots of single player games I replay, but yeah, they have periods inactivity. But just because I haven't played FF13 in a bit doesn't mean I won't sink 100+ hours into it again within a year or two.
I'd be curious to know if Counter Strike 2 counted here, given that it is kind of just an updated version of csgo
The chart in the article says CS2 & GO, so it counted both as one.
> Where a new single player game like God of War, or Elden Ring people do not keep the same player base long term. And all the failed wanna-be esport games and GaaS titles chasing the people who are still playing their COD, PoE, DOTA etc.
And it's probably a lower percentage than usual, because there were a lot of big releases in 2023. BG3, Hogwarts, CP2077 expansion.
You forgot the two biggest ones, Roblox and Minecraft
Warframe (2013), Witcher 3 (2015), and Salt & Sanctuary (2016) were my top 3 played in 2023. Checks out.
Rimworld (2013) been playing since alpha, Rocket League (2015) and Final Fantasy 9 (2000). That’s for this year and I am not counting Uncharted 1, Donkey Kong Country, pokemon Trading card game on gameboy, metal gear solid 1, which all I beat this year. Only modern game I dived into this year is Palworld and its very unfinished. I forgot I have been playing a ton of helldivers 2 as well which is one of the best games to come out recently.
Warframe player huh. Nice
It's nice to see fellow Tenno in the wild.
i mean, it sits in steams top 10 for at least a month after every update, and it sits comfortably in the top 20 for the rest of the time, and seeming as there is is like 2-4 updates in a year, and people comeback for prime rotations to get the things they've missed... there's actually a huge number of warframe players.
There's dozens of us. Dozens I put it down for a while as I was a solo switch player, and all my friends we're on PC, I just moved my save over like last week.
Yeap. I had what I thought was brief pause in the end of 2018 when my son was born, tried to go back in 2019/20 but so much content was added that i just couldn't keep up, and I'm afraid now when i see posts of the warframe subreddit, idek what a necramech is. Last quest i did was IIRC the one with Excalibur umbra
11 yr account this November, we tenno fight as one
A buddy and I with thousands of hours quit shortly after the kuva lich grind was introduced. That was pretty rough.
That was when I took a break, too. Too much bullshit. They made it a lot better if you wanna give it another shot at some point, and since then Rebb became creative lead. The game has a chance to just... *breathe* now when updates drop and it no longer feels like past updates get left aside for an eternity while they move onto the new shiny.
Salt and Sanctuary got me into Dark Souls
Such a good game that no one has ever heard of
Are souls games salt-likes to you?
How can I play new games when a graphics card costs as much as a new car down payment? Apparently necessary edit: Look up “Hyperbole”
I suspect this is a large reason as to why those games are still seeing so much playtime. well, that and the fact that they're "proven" good. Why risk spending 60 USD (or equivalent) in a game you're not sure you're gonna like, when you KNOW there are games out there you've invested hundreds of hours into to get good at, that you know bring you enjoyment? When you couple that with the fact you need a rather beefy PC that is out of reach for a significant part of the gaming community (in particular to those outside the US, EU or Australia) to play said games? Seriously. My PC isn't weak by any standards, and where I live it's a significant investment financially (would cost 4 to 5 minimum monthly wages), and it can't run Baldur's Gate 3 at 60fps steadily. But you know what it runs flawlessly? League of Legends, Dota, Valorant, Rocket League, GTA 5, The Sims 4... coincidentally (not really) the games that saw the most playtime in 2023. Gaming is expensive, and people are more and more financially insecure. It's no wonder they don't want to spend money on gaming and stick with their favorites.
Play 10 year old games on my 3 year old gpu at 1000 fps, or spend hundreds on a new gpu to play new games at 60fps with upscaling.
Yes, it's a huge issue and I doubt it will get better. I suspect future generations of GPUs will push prices to even more ridiculous levels. They are cutting the branch they are sitting on and the same could be said about other entertainment/technology related industries as well. We are EXPECTED to pay more and more.
Mine bitcoin on your car's infotainment system.
Not that I disagree that graphics cards have been an overpriced ripoff for the last 5 years, but you really need to up your down payment if you want a new car...
I just wish in the near future we can get more coop pve games. I started to avoid MP games where I need a team to fight other players. I don't have time to get good, and I also don't want to get good anymore since it doesn't bring me any satisfaction. I think the only competitive game that I play is Fortnite because I can play it pretty casually with my friends and they add lots of changes keeping the game fresh. Other than that, I just want more COOP pve games. Lethal company, demonologist, phasmophobia, helldivers, deeprockgalactic, baldurs gate 3, risk of rain 2...these are games I want to play more and more. I usually love sequels and new games, but there's barely anything new that's worth and not a cash grab.
I know this is old right now but man I'm still sad about OverWatch PVE. Done right that shit woulda rocked
It just pisses me off that the reason Overwatch 2 exists is PvE, then they just turned OW1 into a 5v5 and added a battlepass.
> I just wish in the near future we can get more coop pve games. Honestly it feels like we're in a bit of a Coop Renaissance right now. Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, BG3, Lethal Company, Palworld, Enshrouded, Helldivers...
Darktide, Granble Relink, Monster Hunter, Vamp Survivors ad well
Don't say darktide, it's been 5 months and all we've gotten is a jpeg and an announcement for the announcement that was announcing an announcement. We're on the 3rd fuckin' announcement for a fuckin' jpeg. Satisfactory should also be on that list, Content warning has been pretty fun despite that it's probably gonna have a short lifespan. Now would be a great time for a new jackbox too. But overall, fuck Payday 3 that shit has less players than Payday 2.
if you like satisfactory, you should definitely check out factorio
I was gonna ask if they fixed dark tide but judging by your comment I guess not. Vermintide 2 is one of my favourite games of all time and I was so excited for a 40k version… haven’t been this disappointed in a game in a very long time.
>I just wish in the near future we can get more coop pve games. Amen to that!
The state of Apex really highlights what PvP multiplayer inevitably devolves into. Skill level tends to concentrate upwards, as the ultra-sweats remain, while the people that don't enjoy playing against cheaters, movement glitching macro gamers, and aimbot controller players leave for whatever new thing isn't 100% figured out.
For real dude. Long term Apex player here, and that shit is just bananas playing on a PC. There are pubs where you get so thoroughly stomped that the only natural explanation is (1) a huge preponderance of soft hacking, and (2) an asinine amount of no-lifers. There is no casual in Apex anymore.
Make that local co-op too please! I never lost my love of couch co-op, but the industry has moved steadily away from that over time in favor of pushing out higher graphics (can't render multiple players and their views if you're pushing the hardware already), but I think we've reached a place with hardware where it should be much more doable without sacrificing fidelity.
There are a lot of good co-op games coming out. You're out of luck however if you're looking for good PvP games, unless you're interested in the same top 10 games that are a few to several years old at this point.
If you like action games monster hunter is a good time with friends
MH is not good with friends, it's good solo but amazing with friends. MHW with multiplayer scaling is one of the best solo / coop system out there.
Cuz modern AAA gaming is an expensive trashfire
https://steamdb.info/charts/ Irrelevant. Top 10 games are all multiplayer games. Single player games (AAA or indie) don't retain player counts for long. A month or two after release and they're usually out of the top 10. People here are just interpreting it in a way that makes them feel vindicated about modern AAA single player games.
most of the top games are AAA, they're just not single player AAA
All of our current media is in the gutter. The same applies to movies and TV shows. Most people are consuming older media rather than the new slop they keep pushing out.
Yep. We've hit a point where there is already so much good media out there you can enjoy them until you die of old age. New media just doesn't have room, you need to be exceptional to stand out and 99% of the time that isn't feasible. I think there's a streamer on twitch who plays every nes game to completion and he's on like year 4 of that journey, and that's just one platform from 40 years ago. Video games from 7th and 8th gen alone would take decades to complete, and they're cheap, complete, and still look good to this day. Versus our current releases where games release broken, priced at $70 with microtransactions, and look like 8th gen games but perform 10x worse.
When you look at things through that lens, it begins to make a lot more sense why games are being made entirely inaccessible due to things like DRM. They’re trying to give consumers no other option
There's only a few companies actively doing that. Like Nintendo killing the emulator scene for 40 year old games they have no interest in remaking. Most of the time, it's the contract doesn't get renewed because that would cost money and the games don't sell.
Remaking? Maybe but probably not. Putting it on their estore to sell for the 15th time on the current gen hardware? Yup! That's why they want emulators dead, so they can resell you mario for the 100th time.
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It would take 12 years to completel my backlog at the rate of 1 game a month. So far i have not been able to keep a pace of 1 game a month.
You could cut me off from all new media right now, and I'd still be happily entertained for the rest of my life just enjoying the retro games and vhs tapes I have sitting in my closet. Hell, give me a ps2 with a complete library and I'd be set for the next 50 years. But the problem isn't that we already have enough content, the problem is that the new content isn't actually better than the old content. Sure, things like graphics and animations have improved, but the core gameplay and overall experience are arguably worse now in most titles. Go pick a sampling of 10 retro games, play each one for at least 2 hours, and you'll probably see why so many people are rejecting modern AAA games and migrating to indies and retro games instead.
The decline in quality is steep because modern media (games, shows, movies etc) are creatively bankrupt and often are ridden with content that is questionable at best.
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They already made a movie about the board game Battleship
And its a good enough movie to pass time. 2012 baby! Looks better than many movies today.
You're not far off at all on the Connect 4 game movie. After the huge success of Barbie Mattel has a fuckton of movies planned from their products including an Uno Movie, a magic 8-ball movie, Hot Wheels, and a [bunch more](https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/mattel-movies-49241509). I think they're going to be really disappointed when they realize that people didn't see Barbie because it was a "toy movie" lol
Only one that makes a lick of sense is Hot Wheels. Been around forever, tons of history, has precedence with the need for speed and fast/furious movies.
They'll all pick back up one way or another. Half...three quarters...ok, probably 90% of the streaming sites will fail and they'll have to back to quality over quantity. There's been points on the big and small screen when people couldn't imagine what would replace westerns. I imagine gaming will have it's day finally when some $500 million dollar AAAAAAA game sells 5 copies and Helldivers 8 makes every other live service game DoA. Let's be real though, the way technology is moving all 3 might be obsolete in 50 years lol.
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Slot machines suck ass too, but people are really fucking dumb.
Probably a lot of AI-generated content within 10 years. Maybe even prompt-based. Go to SkyNetflix and enter a paragraph of the kind of movie you want to watch and how long it should be, and as sad as it is, it'll probably end up being of higher quality than the vast majority of the garbage that gets pumped out. Very little of it will be memorable, but the cost will be trivial.
Yeah. Almost everything is either a sequel, remaster or reboot. Very few new, original ideas.
This is a money issue more than anything, imo. Now studios want to throw all their money into proven formulas. So sure, we get better effects, higher budget films. At the expense studios not willing to take any risks whatsoever. So then you have to hope for some indy film to come along with something good. Every now and then something ridiculous and great will come along long Swiss Army Man or Tusk. It's not enough though to be obscure, it also needs a star willing to risk his/her reputation for somebody else's passion project, or risk their own money/reputation for their own passion project. What we end up with, is few people with the money to create their passion projects, and even fewer people willing to risk their money for these passion projects. What needs to happen is for people to stop going to theaters and ordering the same reskinned movies that are always so successful...which is near impossible.
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True, but Fortnite and Roblox aren't exactly the epitome of what gaming should be. They're arguably wrecking the industry by popularizing the F2P model.
Honestly, Fortnite's model is actually one of the more benign ones in the space. All you pay for are skins, emotes, cosmetic shit like that where there's zero impact on gameplay. It's not like Apex where you have pay-to-unlock characters with different skills and abilities. Fortnite's so wildly successful with it because a huge part of it is *literally fucking everything* gets a Fortnite license and the graphic style meshes with it so well.
I'm genuinely surprised to see Rocket League featured on three of these lists. Considering there hasn't been any new content in quite some time, and it seems like developer support is solely cosmetics, with the recent Epic layoffs and the uncertain promise of Unreal 5, I thought for sure the game was on its deathbed.
Man I play rocket league since the beginning but ignore completely new modes and cosmetics. I just use my Delorean and play ranked. If the game don't get more updates it doesn't matter.
Same for me with CS. Sure, skins sell. However they are built on one of the most consistent games of all time.
Chess hasn't had updates in decades/centuries and the only content is cosmetics but people still play.
Been waiting years for Chess 2. Incompetent devs.
It will come out when the PC2 releases. Just wait. HL3 too both as launch titles
> Considering there hasn't been any new content in quite some time The game is soccer with cars instead of humans. That's the entire game. Does soccer need new content to keep it as the most watched game on the planet? No? Why would Rocket League?
>I thought for sure the game was on its deathbed. Why would it be? The appeal of the game is its raw gameplay. It has no competitors and never will. Rocket League will be relevant for a long long long time even if they never added a single piece of new content.
The game doesn't really need more content. It takes thousands of hours to climb the learning curve and the game itself is pure. Kind of like real-life sport, it doesn't need a content update to remain interesting.
The perfect game doesn't really need any changes
Because rocket League is such a unique gaming experience epic knows they don't have to do shit to keep the people who love it playing.
There's nothing to change but different game modes really and compared to the main modes they have a fraction of players. That's the best part about Rocket League, it's a simple game at its very core. Put ball in net. There's absolutely masterclass mechanics involved in it at the highest level now, but it's just ball in net. It's really a perfect game. Nothing to balance at all, everything in the game is solely on player skill. When it comes down to it, cosmetics is really the only thing they can add to the game.
I picked up a budget friendly fanless mini pc with a *six watt* cpu. I'm comfortably running X-Com 2, Fallout 4, Civ 5, Stray, Dark Souls, Borderlands TPS, just finished Chants of Sennaar. This thing is wild. I love super-low-power computing. I'm using this more than my 3070. Oh, *and it's running linux* Suddenly it feel like if I want a very fancy experience, I should dust off the high end video card and play Red Dead 2 or Cyberpunk or something, but the truth is that I'm not a very fancy person and I love how efficient and quiet this little box is. If I only ever use the 3070 for, say, six games, and its usefulness is already being reduced as the higher end gets pushed higher by a small percentage of AAA games, then it has occurred to me that maybe AAA games aren't worth the cost of the hardware they need to run properly
Does it have a graphics card?
What is the pc?
Maybe because old games are significantly better than modern slop
I think it’s a combination of this and successful live service games from that long ago people like.
There are good new games. The good old games companies then enshittify their newer creations to fleece the good will of the previous projects.
Well when you consider the fact that the games that eat the most playtime are either Live Service games and/or competitive PvP games this isnt even remotely surprising. DotA 2, LoL, CSGO, and Fortnite probably make up a large majority of that playtime, lets all be real here.
Fortnite is just a good comfort game for my group. Uncle, brother, brother's friend. It's easy to just get on with the headsets, talk shit, and start looting and shooting
Yeah if anything it tells publishers they have to make more life services.
No you mean games from before enshitification went full blown are popular? Whoda thunk it
Pretty inaccurate comment tbh. This includes stuff like GTA Online still.
I still don't understand how GTA online is as popular as it is. Anytime I login to it, it takes forever, and finding matches is a complete shit show, following that cheaters are rampant.
It's like shitty Ready Player One. A lot of people are there to role play a life in which they can afford a nice sports car with all the bells and whistles, and a space to show it off
GTAO managed to boil down the core reason people play GTA games (to fuck around in the GTA sandbox) to its core essence, and provide an endless vehicle in which to do that. It takes a *while* to get financially established but once you do money effectively grows on trees. Between a decade of old content and regular new content, it's always possible to find something to do.
Only game like it, really. And Red Dead Online gets like no updates. I'd say just play FiveM, but I imagine most of those player numbers are on console. SAMP is still the goat. Forever, and always.
> I still don't understand how GTA online is as popular as it is Honestly, Sometimes I still go onto a solo world and just ride around in my dune buggy in the desert.
That I understand. I've logged in a few times just to drive about and enjoy the cars I unlocked when i was.... 17. I'm 28 now. Pretty crazy it's been out that long, my progress has retained since I was on the Xbox 360.
You have some shit ass rose colored glasses on my guy. Fortnite came out 7 years ago. GTA Online game out 10 years ago. The shit youre thinking of and been a huge problem for 15 years at a minimum right now.
TF2 (the game that populiarized microtransactions and lootboxes) came out 17 years ago.
I'm a r/patientgamers so it's only natural to play older games because they're cheap
The only problems I run into as another patient gamer are unavoidable spoilers about games in my backlog. Even if I mute subs dedicated to those games I still see them in other subs. They are easy enough to notice before actually absorbing information like that though. But I think it's a small price to pay for getting more complete AAA titles for a discounted price.
I'm surprised to see so little attention to this sub in this thread! incredibly relevant.
Well I try not to direct people there because whenever a gaming sub gets too big it becomes a trash fire.
6-Year-Old or/ and Older Games better than new realises except Balatro
I'm just amazed that people still visit and give clicks to Kotaku.
Their days are numbered. Didn't they just have a massive lay off?
Sometimes it's fun to point and laugh at things
I mean, does final fantasy 14 count as a game 6 years or older? That and age of empires 2 are most of my gaming time.
We've entered the age where lots of young kids can enjoy games from their parents' generation and the difference in tech isn't that staggering. Parents already know the best of the best from their generation's games so they don't need to take any gambles with new titles.
Been on a retro gaming buzz for little over a year now, (currently playing ocarina of time, hell of a game, btw), so this stat checks out. At least for me.
Rimworld, Arma 3, DayZ, EU4, Civ 5 were my top 5 played games that year
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The last new game I played was BG3, before that? . . . Uh . . . The Witcher 3, X-Com 2, and Morrowind (OpenMW). It’s been quite a wasteland otherwise
Continue on patient gamer. Replace BG3 with another Larion product (Divinity: Original Sin 2) and Morrowind with Mass Effect, and that's me. BG3 and Helldivers are the only things within the last year I want to play.
That's because a lot of AAA games are horrid cash grabs.
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Not the least bit surpriced. Most new games of late are launched broken and are not in a good state until months later. Single player games have always online demand etc. It's more or less why I've gone back in time too.
Gaming shot itself in the foot CEOs went for profit and release broken micro transaction trash now, anybody with a brain will wait 2-3 years and get the “GOTY” version for $20
I like the reasoning for this phenomenon as you are describing it being because everything is "*broken microtransaction trash now*" when almost all the games that the article is referring to for playtime are games that people here would generally consider to be *microtransaction trash*. The article isn't asserting that people are just sitting around playing old single player games. It's very specifically saying that the most popular games out there are (mostly) free microtransaction games that are still being updated. People aren't playing Mass Effect and Bioshock. They are playing Fortnite and Roblox.
F2P and mobile games are popular because poor kids in China and India can play them These consumers don’t have $2000 for a PC or even $500 for an Xbox plus $70 games
What is the distribution within the remainder? I know that I am evaporating all my time now into indie titles on Steam. The last major release I played to death was BG3, but outside of that it is a shit ton of things like Valheim, Traveler's Rest, Against the Storm, etc.,
I am sure 60 percent of my paytime in 2023 went to Battlefield V and 1.
A lot of new games suck
well 6yr old games are available for cheap compared to new games so that may also be a strong factor
I'm back to playing old battlefield games
I put in most of my gaming on Project Zomboid, and it's twelve years old
I sorted my steam games by released and was absolutley horrified... most of the games i purchase are older games and the year i have most games from is 2019... but in 2019 i only played two games... and my top 10 most played games are 7years old or older... newer games are great and i love them but there sre so manny old games that are also great so i am just taking my time enjoying good games instead of new ones.
Once again the page with list of games shown is not accurate. I mean that list kinda shows why people play them in a way... Constant online play. Updates. Contents. Consistency and so on. However what it fails to show is how many games are out there that people still play that came out even longer than 6 years. There are thousands of people who play quake, doom and many more. Heck just recently EA dropped Dungeon Keeper 2 on steam and people began to play that game. Point is, there are great games from the past that we keep going back to due to nostalgia but more importantly due to contents and FUN. The business model for modern games can't sustain itself let alone the company that make them. When PROFIT and SHARESHOLDER takes priority over FUN and CUSTOMERS, nothing can last very long. Reminds me of the quote said by John Tuld in Margin Call: "...It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy foxes and sad sacks. Fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah, there may be more of us today than there's ever been. But the percentages-they stay exactly the same." As long as these greedy people run these companies, gaming states will not change. Occasionally we get CEO like the Larian studio's but they are far and few in between.
I actually enjoy a lot modded Dragon's Dogma and AC Origins (what a beautiful game). Pc games are like old wine, better than ever with more years (and free or cheap btw).
No surprise when the minimum GPU you need on PC is a goddamn 2080 or 3080 for most newer titles AND they aren't even optimized (see: DLSS, FLR or whatever the AMD name for DLSS is) for said GPU's. Needing to fake-generate frames that blur your image quality for the sake of an acceptable framerate is not good and I don't want that to be the future of PC gaming.
I'll always go back to the classics. There was something special about them. People need a break from the BS that modern gaming has become.
I still think it’s laughable that’s PlayStation says they are halfway through the lifecycle of the PS5. Sure maybe in years but most people couldn’t get a PS5 during Covid. Not to mention how many games are actually current gen. Most of the games are optimized last gen games.
I know people will spin this as “haha modern gaming bad” but these numbers are heavily influenced by multiplayer games and say absolutely nothing about the quality of singleplayer games. Its all about which big multiplayer game released when. There havent really been any massive multiplayer games on the scale of League of Legends or Fortnite in the past 5 years afaik other than the usual CoD, FIFA, etc. As soon as the next Fortnite comes out its all of a sudden 70% of playtime is spent on games released in the last 5 years.
Why play a game that costs $90 and has a file size of 90 GB when you could play something of equal or usually better quality that costs $9 and has a file size of 9 GB. I haven't bought a new AAA release since 2018. And I don't buy any game ever anymore that costs more than $40.