The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
> make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games").
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.
>is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Thief, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
At the same time you still see projects like Beating Every N64 Game [0], so there's evidence that there's still interest even in the absolute worst games on the old consoles.
If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?"
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty.
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?!
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.
You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
It's the same enshittification trajectory as everywhere else. It starts with a product that serves its users and once the money starts flowing in, users are turned into cattle to be milked and shorn.
I know Command and Conquer 4 and Sim City (2013) both required server access at launch to run single player.
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
My issue wit it is the "too much" is just fluff. I'm not overwhelmed because I'm oit of my depth, in that case I'd be excited to sink my teeth into a new system, instead it's pointless or borderline offensive fluff in my face.
It's interesting because the main trend in game-design is to 'streamline' and 'simplify'.
The result is basically that they did the opposite of what we want to achieve in software design: modern game systems are shallow and complicated rather than deep and complex.
One reason is that the older games that are still successful have emergent gameplay -- strategies that weren't planned by the developers but could be found by exploring the space.
If it's so simple to make this analysis, why are these games affected by this problem? Because of business decisions.
The games need to make players jump to new installments.
To do this, they need a compelling reason other than 'we need you to pay full price again', so they introduce new mechanics.
After 20 years of bloat where developers are afraid of abandoning the mechanics from previous generations a lot of systems became both too complex and too complicated, so they simplified by planning out the viable strategies, which generally collapse the hierarchy of strategy layers player could adopt.
This homogenizing force is also greatly driven by e-sports/streaming, where games are designed to be enjoyed as a spectator.
E-sports players want homogeneous strategies as it simplifies greatly adapting to the meta.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players.
To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable.
The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense.
So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge.
But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
BFV and 6 and all that are just bad tbh, I can’t imagine a competitive BF1/5/6 etc scene at all- it’s either aim assist hell, or just lowest common denominator of a gaming experience that stuffs you with stimuli and leaves 0 room for any tactics and communication let alone strategy.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually.
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.)
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it.
Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
Copyright is pretty broken at this point; the drop to zero cost for duplicating bits broke a lot of assumptions 30-odd years ago and we've been slow walking the consequences ever since. AI kind of punched it in the gut, but it was already wobbling. There's been a bunch of attempts to patch things, but there's a significant shear between the common understanding of copyright law, the actual current caselaw, and what you can get away with as either an individual or a corporation. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better--a lot of people have a lot of money invested on things that are increasingly divorced from the economic and social forces at work--but I anticipate a realignment similar to the post printing-press era. (Which took decades for the consequences to ripple out, so we'll probably be at this a while if that's at all comparable.)
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation?
Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.
Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.
Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
It's proof enough about the damage IP law did to culture to see current major American cultural artifacts being 50 year old star wars and even older Marvel comics. That's what current teenager's grandfathers watched.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
The grandparent specifically rejected letting the Mario IP enter the public domain. So whether or not it should, that's a completely different discussion from the one being held here.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
I'm saying there's a middle ground--or could be, if the laws were changed--where companies can keep their IP, but reselling and rent-seeking on decades old creations wouldn't be possible.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
A different question to ask is why the public is obligated to enforce artist's rights in perpetuity? And don't forget that artworks don't just spawn from a single mind - they are buit upon existing, freely available art and general culture, which isn't a subject to special protection in the first place.
I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.
Incorrect question. The correct question is assuming people are willing to share those old games for free (they are), why should we grant someone the right to stop them? Why should we grant people the right to block the creation of derivatives of 40 year old works?
These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both!
I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff.
And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply survivor bias.
Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived.
I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.
Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July.
A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
Right, when Doom came out, everyone who was interested in computer games and could get their hands on this game would absolutely do so. Similar for other major games like Diablo, WarCraft, Quake, etc. Even if someone didn't end up liking it, there was basically no chance they wouldn't at least try it because these were like THE games to play at the time.
That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.
if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?
letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?
would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that...
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
I don’t really like having to convert EPUBs to mobi. I have had issues with Calibre breaking formatting back when I used a Kindle DX in like 2011. I am sure it’s better at conversion now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, so I like being able to immediately drop the EPUBs into a custom folder and point KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
Well one of my Kindles is actually a DX, which can only communicate via 3G which has long been shut down, meaning that the only way to send books to it is via USB, so I don’t think the sendtokindle would work with that.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
Even without matchmaking issues, it can be difficult for new players to break into a community of diehards who have often been playing together for years.
People are pointing out that it's survivorship bias, which is true. But you also have to admit that the game development meta has changed. Microtransactions, gambling, FOMO... it seems like games have gotten more psychological. Like, gamers are being targeted psychologically, using the same sophisticated influence techniques used by casinos or bars or whatever. People haven't caught on that modern researchers have basically "solved" some aspects of human psychology. Especially the aspects that cause us to spend money and to pay attention to things. People also haven't put 2 and 2 together that we're now using these techniques on children.
Old games were created to tell you a story, or surprise you with unusual environment, or unique gameplay, or some mix of above.
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
"Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it."
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
I don't think any of those have private servers that you can run and host games in. They're all far too dependent on microtransactions and in-game-purchased items to implement that kind of robust and long lasting system. They will die because of this as soon as they are not profitable.
Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.
For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen.
I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.
AMD recently annoyed the gaming community - who are among the most susceptible to unnecessary upgraditis - by saying that friends don't let friends buy GPUs with more than 8GB VRAM. If you look at the Steam hardware surveys, that's probably true. An M-series Macbook can play most stuff that isn't current AAA. Proton let's you play virtually anything on Linux and it's incredible (plus the Steam Deck). There's no point buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service.
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.
I think this is still survivor bias though, and the games that traditionally offered map editors still do. There are a lot of games nowadays that allow user-contributed levels/content if not full-on mods.
To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):
> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
I think it is somewhat true for certain crowd. Like say tv series that are run on schedule. There is certain amount of shared existence when everyone is watching or playing at same time even with single player games.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
> "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode".
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
Maybe, but I can't recall a game having separate buttons for these : so it's Direct IP connect with maybe LAN advertising (it would make more sense as a checkbox).
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.
Increasingly, games are more like events, in the past they weren’t. What you pay for is really like a ticket to participate. If you’re not playing a game with people right when it’s new, when the hype is at its peak, you will miss out on the shared experience and social conversation. There are many games out there you could only have experienced at their full potential for a limited time.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming?
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
This is probably a regional thing, but in my experience they're in decline.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
In Australia we used to have a few arcades dotted around the place but I haven't walked past one in a long time. But whenever I go to Japan I'm amazed at how vibrant their arcade scene is. It seems much more communal as well - go hang out at the arcade with your friends.
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/10
Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without install etc.
There's quite a few ports to the browser running around, though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
Older DRM is more commonly cracked because there’s more time to crack it. Though the arms race has grown way more sophisticated from the supply side
You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube anymore.
https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv
There are private servers that you can connect to, no? I remember reading about it not that long ago!
Even all the offline content?
beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.
At that point I think the game is available as ROM file or at least the owner of rare one should make such.
MSX/C64 era: games are smaller than your average png icon
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days
The unit being a $20 CD-ROM drive? Losing the disk would be a bigger problem than damaging the drive.
That's not actually true.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
This is a good point. I'm still looking for a good way for my kids to play mindrover on windows 11, and I haven't found one.
> make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games").
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.
>is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Thief, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
At the same time you still see projects like Beating Every N64 Game [0], so there's evidence that there's still interest even in the absolute worst games on the old consoles.
0: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?"
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.
Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1]
[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
Well now i gotta find a way to play this
There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1].
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600.
Now that game was worth every byte.
Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty.
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?!
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community servers have a license from the publisher.
Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.
Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
On the other hand, Overwatch 1 is dead because Blizzard said so.
Also known as “survivorship bias” [1]
Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
The biggest problem today is ownership.
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
It's the same enshittification trajectory as everywhere else. It starts with a product that serves its users and once the money starts flowing in, users are turned into cattle to be milked and shorn.
so apparently, these 'users' are so lacking in agency that they willingly get milked.
If so, they deserve it.
There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.
> Some of those games are single player only.
Like which?
I know Command and Conquer 4 and Sim City (2013) both required server access at launch to run single player.
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
+1 I can relate completely.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
My issue wit it is the "too much" is just fluff. I'm not overwhelmed because I'm oit of my depth, in that case I'd be excited to sink my teeth into a new system, instead it's pointless or borderline offensive fluff in my face.
It's interesting because the main trend in game-design is to 'streamline' and 'simplify'. The result is basically that they did the opposite of what we want to achieve in software design: modern game systems are shallow and complicated rather than deep and complex. One reason is that the older games that are still successful have emergent gameplay -- strategies that weren't planned by the developers but could be found by exploring the space. If it's so simple to make this analysis, why are these games affected by this problem? Because of business decisions. The games need to make players jump to new installments. To do this, they need a compelling reason other than 'we need you to pay full price again', so they introduce new mechanics. After 20 years of bloat where developers are afraid of abandoning the mechanics from previous generations a lot of systems became both too complex and too complicated, so they simplified by planning out the viable strategies, which generally collapse the hierarchy of strategy layers player could adopt. This homogenizing force is also greatly driven by e-sports/streaming, where games are designed to be enjoyed as a spectator. E-sports players want homogeneous strategies as it simplifies greatly adapting to the meta.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players. To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable. The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense. So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge. But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
[0] https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Gauges
BFV and 6 and all that are just bad tbh, I can’t imagine a competitive BF1/5/6 etc scene at all- it’s either aim assist hell, or just lowest common denominator of a gaming experience that stuffs you with stimuli and leaves 0 room for any tactics and communication let alone strategy.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually.
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.)
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it.
Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
Copyright is pretty broken at this point; the drop to zero cost for duplicating bits broke a lot of assumptions 30-odd years ago and we've been slow walking the consequences ever since. AI kind of punched it in the gut, but it was already wobbling. There's been a bunch of attempts to patch things, but there's a significant shear between the common understanding of copyright law, the actual current caselaw, and what you can get away with as either an individual or a corporation. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better--a lot of people have a lot of money invested on things that are increasingly divorced from the economic and social forces at work--but I anticipate a realignment similar to the post printing-press era. (Which took decades for the consequences to ripple out, so we'll probably be at this a while if that's at all comparable.)
Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once - would help a lot.
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation?
Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.
Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.
Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
It's proof enough about the damage IP law did to culture to see current major American cultural artifacts being 50 year old star wars and even older Marvel comics. That's what current teenager's grandfathers watched.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
The grandparent specifically rejected letting the Mario IP enter the public domain. So whether or not it should, that's a completely different discussion from the one being held here.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
I'm saying there's a middle ground--or could be, if the laws were changed--where companies can keep their IP, but reselling and rent-seeking on decades old creations wouldn't be possible.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
Is Mario art?
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
A different question to ask is why the public is obligated to enforce artist's rights in perpetuity? And don't forget that artworks don't just spawn from a single mind - they are buit upon existing, freely available art and general culture, which isn't a subject to special protection in the first place.
I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.
Incorrect question. The correct question is assuming people are willing to share those old games for free (they are), why should we grant someone the right to stop them? Why should we grant people the right to block the creation of derivatives of 40 year old works?
These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
Why should copyright last 70/95/120 years after death of the author/publication/creation (depending on the situation)?
Extension of copyright is theft from the public domain in a way that non-commercial piracy has never and will never be.
Because it doesn’t bring money anymore anyway. Nobody wins by it being unavailable anymore.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
Why not?
I want FOSS alternatives for every genre.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
If you're interested in a FOSS MTG clone check out XMAGE and Forge. They don't have every card but they do have a whole lot.
https://github.com/magefree/mage https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply survivor bias.
Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived.
I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.
Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.
https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
From the article:
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July.
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
Right, when Doom came out, everyone who was interested in computer games and could get their hands on this game would absolutely do so. Similar for other major games like Diablo, WarCraft, Quake, etc. Even if someone didn't end up liking it, there was basically no chance they wouldn't at least try it because these were like THE games to play at the time.
This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.
It was more of a monoculture.
https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY
That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.
if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?
letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?
would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
"I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?
I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader
Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that...
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
I don’t really like having to convert EPUBs to mobi. I have had issues with Calibre breaking formatting back when I used a Kindle DX in like 2011. I am sure it’s better at conversion now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, so I like being able to immediately drop the EPUBs into a custom folder and point KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
Makes sense.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
Well one of my Kindles is actually a DX, which can only communicate via 3G which has long been shut down, meaning that the only way to send books to it is via USB, so I don’t think the sendtokindle would work with that.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.
Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is:
>Server Hosting and LAN play
I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real.
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
He means "multiplayer games" though.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
Even without matchmaking issues, it can be difficult for new players to break into a community of diehards who have often been playing together for years.
People are pointing out that it's survivorship bias, which is true. But you also have to admit that the game development meta has changed. Microtransactions, gambling, FOMO... it seems like games have gotten more psychological. Like, gamers are being targeted psychologically, using the same sophisticated influence techniques used by casinos or bars or whatever. People haven't caught on that modern researchers have basically "solved" some aspects of human psychology. Especially the aspects that cause us to spend money and to pay attention to things. People also haven't put 2 and 2 together that we're now using these techniques on children.
Old games were created to tell you a story, or surprise you with unusual environment, or unique gameplay, or some mix of above.
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
"Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it."
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
Very few of those games you've listed are new games.
Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.
So from your list, only COD is under 5 years old, and even that might not be depending which version you're talking about!Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old. How old is too old to be "new"?
"New" means you're dependent on an official server.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:
Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)
Apex Legends: February 4, 2019
Valorant: June 2, 2020
Overwatch: May 24, 2016
Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release
League of Legends: October 27, 2009
Dota 2: July 9, 2013
Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)
Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrY...
At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.
Well 1 person just now running the game. And 3 simultaneously today... Does 3 count as people? Steam's statistics are kinda wild at times.
I don't think any of those have private servers that you can run and host games in. They're all far too dependent on microtransactions and in-game-purchased items to implement that kind of robust and long lasting system. They will die because of this as soon as they are not profitable.
Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.
For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen.
But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.
AMD recently annoyed the gaming community - who are among the most susceptible to unnecessary upgraditis - by saying that friends don't let friends buy GPUs with more than 8GB VRAM. If you look at the Steam hardware surveys, that's probably true. An M-series Macbook can play most stuff that isn't current AAA. Proton let's you play virtually anything on Linux and it's incredible (plus the Steam Deck). There's no point buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service.
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.
I think this is still survivor bias though, and the games that traditionally offered map editors still do. There are a lot of games nowadays that allow user-contributed levels/content if not full-on mods.
To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
Wait, what are you talking about ?
Because AMD also recently announced the cheapest (?) new midrange GPU with 16 Go of VRAM :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/amds-radeon-rx-9060-xt-want...
https://wccftech.com/amd-says-8gb-vram-is-sufficient-as-majo...
It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):
> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
That's right. No one is "annoyed". AMD has the best value 16 GB GPUs on the market.
There is an 8GB version of the 9060. Perfectly suitable option for the majority of gamers around the world.
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Su...
It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
Kinda.
There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
I think it is somewhat true for certain crowd. Like say tv series that are run on schedule. There is certain amount of shared existence when everyone is watching or playing at same time even with single player games.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
> "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode".
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
Maybe, but I can't recall a game having separate buttons for these : so it's Direct IP connect with maybe LAN advertising (it would make more sense as a checkbox).
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
(Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.
Increasingly, games are more like events, in the past they weren’t. What you pay for is really like a ticket to participate. If you’re not playing a game with people right when it’s new, when the hype is at its peak, you will miss out on the shared experience and social conversation. There are many games out there you could only have experienced at their full potential for a limited time.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
>It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming?
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
>Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games”
There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
This is probably a regional thing, but in my experience they're in decline.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
In Australia we used to have a few arcades dotted around the place but I haven't walked past one in a long time. But whenever I go to Japan I'm amazed at how vibrant their arcade scene is. It seems much more communal as well - go hang out at the arcade with your friends.
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
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