Couldn't tell ya. I'm still playing games from 2019. With so many game releases nowadays, I have the patience to wait for a good sale to pick up anything new. The only game I've bought on release in the past few years is Baldurs Gate III
Apart from factorio the games I play are 20 years old and older. I was looking forward to Homeworld 3 but they hashed that up so bad that it’s far less fun than the original.
The point being that new stuff isn’t just competing with new stuff but also old stuff.
It depends on the game and especially studio. AAA western studios definitely sanitized themselves, but Japanese games feel pretty ageless (or dated, if you're cynical) in terms of its writing and characters.
Big difference is definitely that separation of realism. Literature is from a specific experience, TV shows try to reflect experiences. Games about a fat italian plumber throwing mushooms at go-karts doesn't really reflect any society in the last century.
Humor that didn't age well but was funny for its time. the gay/crossdressing/fat jokes that were normal 20 years ago that wouldn't pass today are a starting point.
Well with Factorio Space Age I'm hooked for a long time. New DLCs coming for AoE II too, one dropped recently for Wargame Red Dragon, they're really nice to keep "old" game even more relevant than they were. Also remasters when they are well made like the Red Alert one.
Already spent way too many hours in Space Age. About to start on Red Circuits and realized I need to completely reconfigure my main bus.
On a more serious note, I'm really feeling like it's safer to buy dlc and updates for old games than new ones. I was one of the people who freaking preordered Kerbal Space Program 2, thinking it would be amazing and so excited for a new KSP. And then it was such a dumpster fire, I haven't played it more than a dozen hours. From a pure ROI in playtime vs cost, I've gotten literally nine times the value from Factorio then I have from KSP 2, and twenty times the value for KSP 1 (my most played game). And I still play both of them regularly.
Why risk wasting $60 when I know these old games are still good?
I did the same with ksp2... Part that really hurt there was finding out it was a production disaster the entire time.. One or 2 of the correct people in the right place could have saved it!
Busy waiting on bots to build out 16 lanes of copper smelting in my space age base right now, funney enough. Though I'm fixing LDS shortages.
On the topic of old games, many times the Minecraft Modding scene can solve the all the new games suck problem on its own!
Are we turning into old farts with our old games? I play a 25 year old game on a cloned server (EverQuest clone, 1999 MMO). And a newer first person shooter, but free to play.
I think we just probably have less time to play. In college I could blow an entire weekend on a subpar game and be fine with it, because I didn't really have competing priorities.
Now, if I waste $60 and four hours on an abysmal game, it's $60 that I could have used to take my kids to the movies, get takeout for my wife and I, or any number of other things. Same with the time. Five hours is time I could have spent cleaning the house, working on my side projects, etc.
I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
That said, not all new games are terrible. Dredge is a game made last year that was absolutely phenomenal in my mind, and well worth the cost and time. Spent way too many late nights fishing in that game.
> I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
This appears to be the reason with all the recent remakes of “not so old” games. People like us are much more likely to pay to relive our past joys in 4K resolution.
However a part of me often wonders if video games have got to the point where every viable idea has been attempted and it’s only downhill from here. When I was a teen, I definitely did NOT envision myself still playing Age of Empires 2 PvP with strangers online but scene is still here.
Same. And another issue with games is that every game is so long. Games like Tomb Raider used to be 10 hours. Now such games are more than 20 hours. It is a bigger commitment even if you like the game.
That’s why I prefer to buy older games that have received enough reviews from regular people.
Yes! I tried to play the new Spiderman game, and just the sheer amount of stuff to do was overwhelming. Especially because I like to do all the side missions.
I know I sound like the oldest gamer here, but I miss the ratchet and clank style games. Long enough to be engaging, very replayable, but not a full-time job.
I think part of it is because gaming used to be avant garde and now it's being made for the general masses - especially the more expensive games. This is probably why I like Factorio - it knows what it is and really leans into it.
I would say that about 90% of my gaming in the last few months has been on the MiSTer. I am not sure that there exists any games released in the last 15 years that work on there.
That’s probably not true, but I can’t think of any.
People still make new games for old consoles, even full commercial releases. These are done by enthusiasts, of course, but I think some people are possibly making enough money to pay their water bill this way :)
It's a bizarre game in many regards, so it makes sense. I don't think McDonald's has even referenced its old mascots in the last 15 years before this Grimace Birthday thing.
But 20 years+ ago? This would have been a dime a dozen licensed game.
That is a big factor. I believe over half of the top 10 most played games on steam at any given time are 5+ years old. GTA V was played across 3 generations and its still in the top 20 most played games.
Market's being captured, and there's less to appeal to when people are stuck in a service bubble instead of moving on. That's a big part of why consoles are stagnating in Gen 9; economy and a lot of people are fine with PS4's, which still is getting new games.
Part of the problem is that new games are too often filled with bugs, ads, microtransactions, pointless timegates, etc. You can't trust reviews, so there's no telling what you're going to get. Game companies have burned players so many times that buying a game at launch, even if you like the franchise, just isn't wise.
That said, while I'm normally the type to play 10-15 years behind, I did pick up a copy of stellar blade on launch day just on a whim and it was amazing. No ads, no parts of the story paywalled off, nothing but fun and they've put out a lot of updates since making improvements, and dropping new outfits and gameplay modes. I kind of felt like I hit the lottery buying a game I knew basically nothing about on day one and not feeling like I was ripped off later, but that should be the norm. I'm tempted to get Astro Bot although it seems pricey.
I'm long used to it: But as a JRPG fan, it's always intriguing going to general gaming discourse and seeing complaints of stuff like ads/lootboxes/mtx in single player games. Just really shows how stark the western gaming sphere shifted.
Japanese games feel just like the 2010's but slightly better graphics. They leave all that stuff to the mobile scene, but console games have about the same expectations when you hear "single player game". Unless you are addicted to buying skin DLC, there's not much add-ons to buy once a game is out. If these current western sentiments are a detractor, I'd start looking more into where a game is made in addition to all other research.
Korea (which is where Stellar Blade was made) and China (Black Myth Wukong) are entirely different stories, but similar outcomes. Let's just say they are rediscovering console/PC gaming and they are starting off from the 2000's model, not the 2020's western model.
> The too many games argument always seemed toxically Malthusian to me. Like who made too many games? Who should stop making games?
It's exactly the same as farmers planting too much. It doesn't matter if people love what they planted. There is a limit to what people can reasonably consume.
Only, unlike farming, I don't expect governments to intervene in the market. Video games aren't exactly a critical good.
Just as you say, it's a matter of it just being comparatively very easy to make games. These questions have easy answers:
> Like who made too many games?
Everybody.
> Who should stop making games?
Nobody.
It's simply that more games get made than anyone can possibly consume. That counts as "too many [to consume]". That doesn't mean anything should change.
It only feels weird because we recently came from a time where it felt like you could play every game coming out (except if you allow flash games, that actually hasn't been true for a longer time than it seems).
But nobody is complaining that "we made too many t-shirt designs in 2024 and I can't wear them all."
Some of everyone is complaining about some of everything. Some people want more attention. I don't think there's a serious proposal to limit the amount of music made. There will always be people making music for the love of it. And since distributing it is now free, you'll need some kind of special angle if you want to get paid.
My point is that not all musicians are complaining. And nor are all the game publishers.
they don't need to complain. Just lay off people and make the rest work harder. Ubisoft is falling in real time and their grand plan to recover is "make 2 Assassin's Creed's a year for 5 years". Denial is worse than ignorance.
No one does everything. But there is a valid reason to understand these complaints. That's all that matters.
Farm subsidies exist as an alternative to the granary system. Countries without decent crop subsidies have historically and still to this day suffer with famine. Countries with decent crop subsidies never feel crop failures bad enough for people to even consider the idea that food could run short.
> Farm subsidies exist as an alternative to the granary system.
Except that the granary system is counter-cyclical and actually provides food when there is a crisis. Subsides are pro-cyclical and can't do anything in less than 6 months on the quicker case, 1 year in general.
Videogames are rapidly becoming the predominant medium of artistic expression. Especially horror (even Undertale could be categorized as horror or at least with horror elements). I've seen horror games that are far more complex thematically than anything coming out of Hollywood or in literature these days.
Would it be true to say that technological and educational progress makes art increasingly complex as it is easier to use a specific art medium having means to do so?
I did not think of AI generation starting my comment but here I am with my last sentence.
I think that's generally the case. In Aesthetic Theory (which is fairly inaccessible to the general public, probably best to read this[0] article instead) Adorno suggests that art mediums progressively annihilate each other as technology advances and the condition of possibility for an artwork is also the destruction of all previous works of art, both solidifying them in the history of art and also restructuring it entirely around the artwork itself, which contains all previous art historical ruptures inside it.
Some of my favorite stories are from videogames, but I don't know if the medium as a whole is outpacing films. AAA games have a lot of the same problems as Hollywood; they're usually very formulaic and safe. And while indie games are more thematically varied, they're hit or miss on execution, a lot like indie films.
That said, horror movies specifically are often very underwhelming in the themes they explore, so horror videogames don't have a high bar to beat.
While I won't necessarily agree with Vice City being the appropriate demarcation, I recently learned that GTA Vice City (2002) is closer in time to its settings (1986) than it is to the present day, and that made me feel things.
And yet, there's few early-2000's nostalgia, even 90's nostalgia or retro hasn't really taken off yet. Closest thing I can think of is Breaking Bad, and that came out in 2008, so at the time it wasn't even "2000's nostalgia".
But the thing with BB is that cheap feature-phones are an important plot device, but 2008 was a turning point in that the iPhone and Android smartphones were taking the world by storm, as did fast always-on internet. I posit that it's not so much the year or time, but the technology and experiences of the time that determine if something is considered retro.
80's was cable TV and walkmans; 90's wasn't much different, but late 90's / early 2000's was marked by the rise of the internet. But people sitting at their computer doesn't make for good TV. Late 2000's to now is the era of smartphones, but again, I don't think anyone will feel nostalgic about people sitting alone together browsing Reddit or HN for hours on end.
I’d say quantity is no replacement for quality. 3000 games could have been released in Q3 of 2024 but I wouldn’t have noticed because there are exactly zero I want to play online with game pass or be permanently connected to the internet for.
For juxtapositional context: This article [1] came out in 2016 and gives a great overview of why and how difficult it is to be successful (especially more than once) in the video game industry.
Entertaining people is _very_ challenging work.
John Carmack [2]: "The work in the aerospace industry is "simple" compared to the work he does in video games"
Like any production, most corporate interests simply don't respect the medium.
Its a tough call for studios, as training some talent is impossible due to zero workmanship ethics from prior trauma in production environment art. And No, most don't give a fsck about AI due to the copyright liability it injects. lol =3
Couldn't tell ya. I'm still playing games from 2019. With so many game releases nowadays, I have the patience to wait for a good sale to pick up anything new. The only game I've bought on release in the past few years is Baldurs Gate III
Apart from factorio the games I play are 20 years old and older. I was looking forward to Homeworld 3 but they hashed that up so bad that it’s far less fun than the original.
The point being that new stuff isn’t just competing with new stuff but also old stuff.
>The point being that new stuff isn’t just competing with new stuff but also old stuff.
I think that this will become a bigger and bigger problem for the games industry.
While movies, TV shows, literature, and music are always expressions of a particular time/culture/generation, games are usually much more universal.
E.g. young people today find Friends more problematic than funny, but have no problem enjoying Mario Kart.
It depends on the game and especially studio. AAA western studios definitely sanitized themselves, but Japanese games feel pretty ageless (or dated, if you're cynical) in terms of its writing and characters.
Big difference is definitely that separation of realism. Literature is from a specific experience, TV shows try to reflect experiences. Games about a fat italian plumber throwing mushooms at go-karts doesn't really reflect any society in the last century.
I wouldn't say that at all. People are thin-skinned about plenty of games too.
Why is Friends problematic?
Humor that didn't age well but was funny for its time. the gay/crossdressing/fat jokes that were normal 20 years ago that wouldn't pass today are a starting point.
Well with Factorio Space Age I'm hooked for a long time. New DLCs coming for AoE II too, one dropped recently for Wargame Red Dragon, they're really nice to keep "old" game even more relevant than they were. Also remasters when they are well made like the Red Alert one.
Already spent way too many hours in Space Age. About to start on Red Circuits and realized I need to completely reconfigure my main bus.
On a more serious note, I'm really feeling like it's safer to buy dlc and updates for old games than new ones. I was one of the people who freaking preordered Kerbal Space Program 2, thinking it would be amazing and so excited for a new KSP. And then it was such a dumpster fire, I haven't played it more than a dozen hours. From a pure ROI in playtime vs cost, I've gotten literally nine times the value from Factorio then I have from KSP 2, and twenty times the value for KSP 1 (my most played game). And I still play both of them regularly.
Why risk wasting $60 when I know these old games are still good?
I did the same with ksp2... Part that really hurt there was finding out it was a production disaster the entire time.. One or 2 of the correct people in the right place could have saved it!
Busy waiting on bots to build out 16 lanes of copper smelting in my space age base right now, funney enough. Though I'm fixing LDS shortages.
On the topic of old games, many times the Minecraft Modding scene can solve the all the new games suck problem on its own!
Are we turning into old farts with our old games? I play a 25 year old game on a cloned server (EverQuest clone, 1999 MMO). And a newer first person shooter, but free to play.
I was looking forward to a new Homeworld. Shame.
I think we just probably have less time to play. In college I could blow an entire weekend on a subpar game and be fine with it, because I didn't really have competing priorities.
Now, if I waste $60 and four hours on an abysmal game, it's $60 that I could have used to take my kids to the movies, get takeout for my wife and I, or any number of other things. Same with the time. Five hours is time I could have spent cleaning the house, working on my side projects, etc.
I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
That said, not all new games are terrible. Dredge is a game made last year that was absolutely phenomenal in my mind, and well worth the cost and time. Spent way too many late nights fishing in that game.
> I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
This appears to be the reason with all the recent remakes of “not so old” games. People like us are much more likely to pay to relive our past joys in 4K resolution.
However a part of me often wonders if video games have got to the point where every viable idea has been attempted and it’s only downhill from here. When I was a teen, I definitely did NOT envision myself still playing Age of Empires 2 PvP with strangers online but scene is still here.
Same. And another issue with games is that every game is so long. Games like Tomb Raider used to be 10 hours. Now such games are more than 20 hours. It is a bigger commitment even if you like the game.
That’s why I prefer to buy older games that have received enough reviews from regular people.
Yes! I tried to play the new Spiderman game, and just the sheer amount of stuff to do was overwhelming. Especially because I like to do all the side missions.
I know I sound like the oldest gamer here, but I miss the ratchet and clank style games. Long enough to be engaging, very replayable, but not a full-time job.
I viscerally feel like I'm wasting time when i play computer games, such that it ruins the enjoyment.
I'm making a list of all the games I want to play in retirement...
I usually listen to an audiobook or a podcast while I play Factorio or another story-light game, so as to offset that feeling.
I use the two hour return policy on Steam to make sure I avoid paying for bad games (and get out before I spend too much time on it as well)
I think part of it is because gaming used to be avant garde and now it's being made for the general masses - especially the more expensive games. This is probably why I like Factorio - it knows what it is and really leans into it.
I would say that about 90% of my gaming in the last few months has been on the MiSTer. I am not sure that there exists any games released in the last 15 years that work on there.
That’s probably not true, but I can’t think of any.
People still make new games for old consoles, even full commercial releases. These are done by enthusiasts, of course, but I think some people are possibly making enough money to pay their water bill this way :)
McDonalds of all parties had a new Gameboy game commissioned last year: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/for-reasons-no-one-ca...
Oh yeah! You know, I actually played that game on the MiSTer and it still didn’t register to me that it was a game released in the last 15 years.
It's a bizarre game in many regards, so it makes sense. I don't think McDonald's has even referenced its old mascots in the last 15 years before this Grimace Birthday thing.
But 20 years+ ago? This would have been a dime a dozen licensed game.
You might also be getting older and more nostalgic…
Sins of a Solar Empire 2, on the other hand, lives up to how good the original was
That is a big factor. I believe over half of the top 10 most played games on steam at any given time are 5+ years old. GTA V was played across 3 generations and its still in the top 20 most played games.
Market's being captured, and there's less to appeal to when people are stuck in a service bubble instead of moving on. That's a big part of why consoles are stagnating in Gen 9; economy and a lot of people are fine with PS4's, which still is getting new games.
Part of the problem is that new games are too often filled with bugs, ads, microtransactions, pointless timegates, etc. You can't trust reviews, so there's no telling what you're going to get. Game companies have burned players so many times that buying a game at launch, even if you like the franchise, just isn't wise.
That said, while I'm normally the type to play 10-15 years behind, I did pick up a copy of stellar blade on launch day just on a whim and it was amazing. No ads, no parts of the story paywalled off, nothing but fun and they've put out a lot of updates since making improvements, and dropping new outfits and gameplay modes. I kind of felt like I hit the lottery buying a game I knew basically nothing about on day one and not feeling like I was ripped off later, but that should be the norm. I'm tempted to get Astro Bot although it seems pricey.
I'm long used to it: But as a JRPG fan, it's always intriguing going to general gaming discourse and seeing complaints of stuff like ads/lootboxes/mtx in single player games. Just really shows how stark the western gaming sphere shifted.
Japanese games feel just like the 2010's but slightly better graphics. They leave all that stuff to the mobile scene, but console games have about the same expectations when you hear "single player game". Unless you are addicted to buying skin DLC, there's not much add-ons to buy once a game is out. If these current western sentiments are a detractor, I'd start looking more into where a game is made in addition to all other research.
Korea (which is where Stellar Blade was made) and China (Black Myth Wukong) are entirely different stories, but similar outcomes. Let's just say they are rediscovering console/PC gaming and they are starting off from the 2000's model, not the 2020's western model.
I played Baldur's Gate for a while, but then I went back to Crusader Kings 3 (2020), Europa Universalis IV (2013), and Sims 4 (2014).
> The too many games argument always seemed toxically Malthusian to me. Like who made too many games? Who should stop making games?
It's exactly the same as farmers planting too much. It doesn't matter if people love what they planted. There is a limit to what people can reasonably consume.
Only, unlike farming, I don't expect governments to intervene in the market. Video games aren't exactly a critical good.
Just as you say, it's a matter of it just being comparatively very easy to make games. These questions have easy answers:
> Like who made too many games?
Everybody.
> Who should stop making games?
Nobody.
It's simply that more games get made than anyone can possibly consume. That counts as "too many [to consume]". That doesn't mean anything should change.
It only feels weird because we recently came from a time where it felt like you could play every game coming out (except if you allow flash games, that actually hasn't been true for a longer time than it seems).
But nobody is complaining that "we made too many t-shirt designs in 2024 and I can't wear them all."
Amateur musicians do complain all the time about not getting enough attention… at least in every country that I’ve heard of?
Some of everyone is complaining about some of everything. Some people want more attention. I don't think there's a serious proposal to limit the amount of music made. There will always be people making music for the love of it. And since distributing it is now free, you'll need some kind of special angle if you want to get paid.
My point is that not all musicians are complaining. And nor are all the game publishers.
>And nor are all the game publishers.
they don't need to complain. Just lay off people and make the rest work harder. Ubisoft is falling in real time and their grand plan to recover is "make 2 Assassin's Creed's a year for 5 years". Denial is worse than ignorance.
No one does everything. But there is a valid reason to understand these complaints. That's all that matters.
Farm subsidies exist as an alternative to the granary system. Countries without decent crop subsidies have historically and still to this day suffer with famine. Countries with decent crop subsidies never feel crop failures bad enough for people to even consider the idea that food could run short.
> Farm subsidies exist as an alternative to the granary system.
Except that the granary system is counter-cyclical and actually provides food when there is a crisis. Subsides are pro-cyclical and can't do anything in less than 6 months on the quicker case, 1 year in general.
No one has indicated any confusion to that reference.
Videogames are rapidly becoming the predominant medium of artistic expression. Especially horror (even Undertale could be categorized as horror or at least with horror elements). I've seen horror games that are far more complex thematically than anything coming out of Hollywood or in literature these days.
Would it be true to say that technological and educational progress makes art increasingly complex as it is easier to use a specific art medium having means to do so?
I did not think of AI generation starting my comment but here I am with my last sentence.
I think that's generally the case. In Aesthetic Theory (which is fairly inaccessible to the general public, probably best to read this[0] article instead) Adorno suggests that art mediums progressively annihilate each other as technology advances and the condition of possibility for an artwork is also the destruction of all previous works of art, both solidifying them in the history of art and also restructuring it entirely around the artwork itself, which contains all previous art historical ruptures inside it.
[0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/
Some of my favorite stories are from videogames, but I don't know if the medium as a whole is outpacing films. AAA games have a lot of the same problems as Hollywood; they're usually very formulaic and safe. And while indie games are more thematically varied, they're hit or miss on execution, a lot like indie films.
That said, horror movies specifically are often very underwhelming in the themes they explore, so horror videogames don't have a high bar to beat.
it’s been this way since vice city
While I won't necessarily agree with Vice City being the appropriate demarcation, I recently learned that GTA Vice City (2002) is closer in time to its settings (1986) than it is to the present day, and that made me feel things.
And yet, there's few early-2000's nostalgia, even 90's nostalgia or retro hasn't really taken off yet. Closest thing I can think of is Breaking Bad, and that came out in 2008, so at the time it wasn't even "2000's nostalgia".
But the thing with BB is that cheap feature-phones are an important plot device, but 2008 was a turning point in that the iPhone and Android smartphones were taking the world by storm, as did fast always-on internet. I posit that it's not so much the year or time, but the technology and experiences of the time that determine if something is considered retro.
80's was cable TV and walkmans; 90's wasn't much different, but late 90's / early 2000's was marked by the rise of the internet. But people sitting at their computer doesn't make for good TV. Late 2000's to now is the era of smartphones, but again, I don't think anyone will feel nostalgic about people sitting alone together browsing Reddit or HN for hours on end.
- Broken Sword
- Curses!/Jigsaw
- The Longest Journey
- Trinity
- Outcast
Text/graphical adventures were like 20-30 years ahead of Hollywood, but 20 years behind paper books and fandom.
I’d say quantity is no replacement for quality. 3000 games could have been released in Q3 of 2024 but I wouldn’t have noticed because there are exactly zero I want to play online with game pass or be permanently connected to the internet for.
For juxtapositional context: This article [1] came out in 2016 and gives a great overview of why and how difficult it is to be successful (especially more than once) in the video game industry.
Entertaining people is _very_ challenging work.
John Carmack [2]: "The work in the aerospace industry is "simple" compared to the work he does in video games"
[1] https://lostgarden.com/2016/11/17/autumn-of-indie-game-marke...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Armadillo_Aerospa...
The problem is not too many but games but not enough good games being released.
how would one define "good game" in this case?
Like any production, most corporate interests simply don't respect the medium.
Its a tough call for studios, as training some talent is impossible due to zero workmanship ethics from prior trauma in production environment art. And No, most don't give a fsck about AI due to the copyright liability it injects. lol =3