People are reading the headline and assuming they’re talking about older single-purchase games, but the article is actually referring to mostly MTX-driven games that get continuous updates.
And the data further shows, in Newzoo’s own words, that these 908 million “PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games.”
Remember that even things like Rocket League are about a decade old at this point, and games like LoL, Dota 2 and CS:GO are even older
Turns out that people like playing games that respect their time and aren’t a glorified second job. Who knew.
that respect their time
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
Hah, just edited the comment for you.
The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft… My job is a second job.
Tell that to everyone playing games like path of exile (which i admittedly have also played too much of in the past).
PoE, Factorio, etc
I seem to like games that require spreadsheets
I am on a 6 year old computer playing 10 year old games. I don’t see a need to upgrade anytime soon.
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I bet WoW runs like a dream on that machine 😂
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If it makes you feel better, it will never be the same as it was when you first played. Every time there is a xpac that looks interesting I have tried and failed to get that feeling back. It devolves very quickly into feeling like a job again.
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I do hate being in the never ending upgrade cycle but the 10 year old games are limited, at least the ones I like to play.
Most new AAA games suck, that’s why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
Now they’re made with marketable ‘passion’, ‘dedication’, and a team with ‘a family atmosphere’. My personal favorite ‘respect for the lore and previous games in the series’ definitely never has made a triple A game worse for wear.
Disingenuous buzzwords with no objective meaning behind them are my favorite things to hear in a game. It tells me to steer clear as far away as I possibly can. Which is a shame because I’d like to be excited about vampire: the masquerade 2.
Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.
The industry is deeply misguided.
It feels like it’s always been this way. The amount of ‘doom clones’ from the way back times are not to be forgotten.
It has, and its not just games though. Clothes, cars, movies, anime, even food all have trends. There are those that innovate, and those that imitate.
Built a new killer rig last summer. Have spent 90% of my time with it playing HL1 mods.
Recently upgraded to a 7800x3D, 64GB DDR5, and a 4070… which I’ve been using to get back into modded Minecraft recently.
Same machine… The framerates I’m getting in Rimworld are off the charts.
Tbf, the larger modpacks can be pretty resource intensive.
Because crypto miners ruined gaming top end GPUs used to be $300 Max, now were looking in the thousands to have the best GPU for like 6 months, and you can’t buy a used one because it could be a clapped out card used in a crypto miner
Bitcoin switched to industrial ASICs a long time ago, and Ethereum has completely moved away from proof-of-work mining in 2022, see: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked, no one mines with GPUs anymore, at least not for any major blockchain. GPUs are mainly being used with AI now
That doesn’t mean that their effect on the GPU market will up and vanish overnight. Market correction doesn’t usually go down as fast as it goes up.
Edit: add to that the tariff situation and the standoff with China and Taiwan (where all the processors for gpus are made), and you have a situation where things are just going to get more expensive no matter what.
It’s AI at this point. Nvidia considers the gamer division to be vestigial. They were a $700B market cap company that was primarily known for gaming GPUs. They are now quadruple that with AI, and that’s even with some recent hits to their stock price.
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
I don’t follow crypto trends so I hadn’t heard about this either.
I had to look up proof-of-stake, and for Ethereum apparently is required to stake 32 coins to operate a node. Another google search shows me a single Ethereum coin is just north of $2k USD. So someone mining Etherium today needs to have more than $64k if Etherium to even run a node now?!
Pay to play baby! Let’s reinvent the banking system by doing the same exact shit.
Not really to be honest, the power is in the decentralization, permissionless and opensource nature of the system. You can’t get that out of the traditional system
Of course not all networks are the same and there are always shit ones out there that compromise on those tenets, but if you do your due dilligence, you will see there is value in some of them
No, not really, you can start staking with as many as you want, see pooled staking: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/pools/
Staking pools are a collaborative approach to allow many with smaller amounts of ETH to obtain the 32 ETH required to activate a set of validator keys
You earn rewards proportional to the amount you stake
You only need 32 ETH to stake if you want to solo stake / home stake and you don’t pool resources with anyone else, see https://ethereum.org/en/staking/solo/
It was 4k per coin. Source: me as I cry with my 2 ETH. 😭
I don’t think it’s even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I’m probably not getting in on launch because there’s a big chance I’ll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n’th time, because I feel like that’s what I want to play. I’ll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.
IMO, GPU prices have an impact. Modern gaming has a bad habit of not optimizing games relying on people getting newer GPUs for performance.
Mix that with the pre-order/early access monetization, and we are to a point where games have made their money before release, and beans counters don’t want to put money in QA because there is no quantifiable ROI (there is a ROI, but it is hard to quantify), which is a no-no in their world.
Indie games have a tendancy to be less GPU demanding, and thus, usually have a better performance experience
Yep, that’s the thing. Games have to be bigger, better, more fun than ever before, and yet the publishers and management want it to be done quicker and quicker than ever before, so it’s a pretty difficult thing. That, combined with bad working conditions and the public shitting on you because “game devs are shitty/greedy/etc” with developers being used coloquially to absorb all the blame that should be reserved for management, and things are in a pretty tough spot.
Though, at the same time, it’s a better time now than ever before to actually be a gamer, because not only can you play any half-decent new games, but you can also play the entire library of older games, retro games, etc.
Why should I dump 60usd plus into a multiplayer focused game I’ll maybe get to play 4 hours a week during prime times that is going to shrivel up and die in 2 years time when the next big thing comes out?
Or I can play all these games enjoy, have passionate modding communities adding to the game for free on top of me picking the entire thing up for maybe 20usd on sale if not less.
This would be a great time to promote !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol
!newcommunities@lemmy.world is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
I’m not patient, I’m just broke.
It forces you to be patient. You fit the bill
New games just don’t have a ‘punch’ to it anymore. They are not not game breaking anymore.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with old games either. They are the same as they were, which is why reboots and remakes are so popular.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess…
A good story isn’t something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
Well. The nature of my backlog is like I wait for games to come down in price and by the time I get to them they’re 10 years old haha.
I also have a habit of playing through the entire series before playing the newest one. I’m currently playing Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion which is the 4th game from Japan in that series but the 2nd to be released in US, SO I’m playing through it even though I don’t like it and will beat the next two games to finally play Trails in the Sky which is the one I really probably should have started with.
I do that with all my games, like Doom Eternal looks cool and so does the upcoming Dark Ages, but I went back and played Doom 1 & 2. 64, then the updated remaster of Doom 1 & 2 when that came out, and now I’m working on Doom 3. I got one more whole Doom game before I even get to Eternal.
There are good new games, but i cannot afford to pay for them. Especially when I blow through them in a couple of weeks/days.
Which is why I pirate them as a lot of new games lack quality content, are often buggy, and riddled with dlc/micro transactions. Why risk my money on a buggy undeveloped game when I can ‘test’ them for free, at times I have gone back and paid for a game I really enjoyed… but that is super rare.
Plus GPUs are overpriced, especially with AI taking over as it is, the price is just going to go up.
Why bother with all of that when I can just boot up Factorio again. Additionally mods really make old games feel fresh again… And they are free.
My principle is “One euro, for one hour”.
Does the game cost 40e? Am I unsure whether I’d enjoy the game for 40 hours? I’ll get it for free first. Does it stick for that 40 hours or more, or will I get sure enough while playing to play that 40 hours at least? OK, take my money. No? It gets forgotten in my folder, and probably deleted later.
Because we have a giant backlog of steam sales.
That reminds me— I gotta do another Fallout: New Vegas run.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
Yes, actually that was my intended next run! I just gotta remember how to set up everything.
I’m still playing Skyrim.
I was playing a bunch of Skyrim with mods last year! Awesome game.
I can wait till a game is $5. I’ve got so many to enjoy already.
Darktide, you’re worth $5. Admit it. Release a dlc pack with new maps gamemodes characters classes whatever if you want more money. But the base game is worth $5.
I wanna shoot the heavy bolter at shit. The sounds for the gun sound so satisfyingly chunky. Slap that hunk of metal in the emperor’s name. Hell yeah
See you in 2-3 years
I usually wait until the triple A games at under $30. I have a backlog of games I still have yet to touch, so I don’t feel the need to immediately buy games. At $30, even if I only play it for a few hours, it is a decent value per hour.
