As a gamer since early 90s I decided to look through my played games list of at least 256 games, avg year of the game release is 2005, oldest I’ve played is from 1981 and newest is 2023. By the decades:
80s - 10 games (actually more but I did not record them all)
90s - 51 games
2000s - 113 games
2010s - 72 games
2020s - 10 games
About play time… I play mostly pre2020 stuff, mostly minecraft (lol) and playing all the good classic stuff I’ve missed since 3d era, finished Thief 1/2 recently. I actually trying to find something new I like since I bought decent gpu, but it is hard… I don’t care about Fortnite/Overwatch/CS2 (CS 1.x + bots/Source ftw)/AnyGameWithLargeSword. Meme about buying $ XXX gpu just to play Terraria is real.
I am in my mid-30s, and play fortnite semi regularly. Zero-build is just a solid FPS, and the changing load outs keep it fresh. I play pretty much exclusively with friends my age that have moved to other parts of the country and it’s a great way to keep in touch with them.
Fortnite is okay in my book, because while it may not be a game I’ll ever play, it subsidizes all the freebies from Epic. I have a library of well over 200 games, most being excellent indies with a few AAA titles, and I’ve never given Epic a single cent.
I’ve played Rocket League for more than 2000 hours since its release, but honestly I kinda felt like it was dying. Very little interesting new content, silly decisions like removing trading. I haven’t played seriously for more than a year now. It’s surprising to me to still see it so high up
It’s a game about navigating the mission of publishing “all the news that’s fit to print” when your key demographic may not want to hear that news, or may want it softened or ideologically slanted for their comfort.
This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
I agree with the rest but it’s not just modern gaming it was happening back in the 90s on consoles and earlier in arcades. One of the first games I played was an obvious cash grab by Marvel, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge for the Gameboy. It was barely playable.
Ive commented on this before, as sad as it is if we want innovative, expansive, beautiful AAA titles we have to accept that investors arent going to keep backing the money truck up on maybes. Microtransactions, subscriptions, dlcs… there has to be an ongoing income stream or an absolutely eyewatering launch price OR we get used to safer and safer bets or games with very narrow scopes.
Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.
I think you have to ask yourself if the company is behaving ethically.
If a game is F2P but has microtransactions that arent P2W and the devs are continuing to maintain the game then its hard to be mad that they want to make some money off the basic game you get for free. (Mechwarrior online is a pretty good example of this)
If its a subscription, are you getting regular additional content for the money or is the subscription just allowing you to play the game you paid for? Do you still have to buy DLCs and pay subscription?
If its DLC, is it meaningful storylines/maps/characters? Does it make the prospect of another playthrough different or more interesting? Is it a reasonable price for what it gives you?
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
I personally like to think this trend of enshittification in the gaming industry is geared more towards the triple AAA side of things because a lot of the actual indie devs (not the people putting out low effort mobile games or shovelware or scams or straight up large corporatios masquerading their games as indie titles) are putting out some of the best games I’ve seen in years for single player experiences.
Though I absolutely agree with your assessment of the situation in general.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
I don’t think I can recall something truly novel since I think we’ve pretty much gone past the point of novel concepts in the majority of genres, but there have definitely been standouts in certain genres over the years.
In the deck building and rogue like genre we’ve seen Balatro, the poker based game. In the retro inspired games genre, we’ve got Corn Kidz 64, a shorter game that controls and looks like an N64 title.
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Aktywne