A newly released game industry report by market researcher Newzoo shows that while the PC and console market grew 2.6 percent in 2023, overall playtime decreased as gamers spent more and more time in a smaller list of old games like Fortnite* *and League of Legends.
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I would actually say that they tend to be considerably worse.
Games that are just MVPs with a massive, fully featured microtransaction store, often featuring a story by committee, visuals that arent any better than five years ago, shitty ai, filled to the brim with bugs, and all running at less than 60 fps on good hardware.
Fuck new big games.
I’ll take a 10 hour to finish, passion project by an indie dev over AAA every time.
I don’t know if we’re there, but I would expect the game market to mature over time. If you think about it, it’s a little odd for every year to see a new product that everyone wants to switch to over all products made in the past. I mean, I don’t discard my chairs or my dinner plates to get new and better ones each year.
Many industries saw change as the result of the introduction of the microchip and Moore’s law. If your computing capabilities increased exponentially over time, if you could figure out how to leverage computation – and that is something that video games could definitely leverage – you could do a lot more every year.
For a long time, that translated directly to an increase in the rate of serial computation capacity, doubling about every year-and-a-half. The rapid rate of exponential increase that we had seen for decades fell off in the early 2000s, as I recall.
googles
Yeah:
https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png
A lot of the increases in performance that we’ve seen since then have been through improving parallel computation capacity, which isn’t quite as much of a “free” performance increase – it doesn’t apply to all problems, and for problems to which it does apply, it may take real work to make it apply.
The difference between a computer made in 1990 being used in 2000 is just larger than between a computer made in 2010 used in 2020.
Video games faced a lot of technical limitations that were being rapidly stripped away; for a long time, all a video game needed to do was to convert that new, free processing power into something interesting and it could outshine its predecessors.
I suppose that in theory, there could be some sort of new enabling technology that comes along that permits for a lot of new stuff on a continuing basis but that’s a big ask. Maybe virtual reality would have done it for video games – though I don’t know if that would have been a one-off or a continuous, exponential increase – but so far, I think that it’s fair to say that VR hasn’t really taken off in the way that some have hoped.
The shift to touch screens also created demand for games that were touch-screen friendly.
But input changes like that are rare. Lots of companies have tried it, and they haven’t really taken off – the mouse-and-keyboard on PCs has stayed pretty much the same for decades. Consoles – where a single console vendor can force an entire market to switch to a new input device, doesn’t have the collective action problem of PCs where it’s hard to get the entire industry to switch at once, so few game developers want to target a new platform with few users and create a chicken-and-egg problem between few games and few users with hardware – have seen small changes, like an increase in buttons and introduction of analog sticks and triggers.
And it’s not that touch screens are producing large, exponential changes in some industry-shattering way that open new doors to game developers in a given year that were closed to developers in past years. Maybe the shift to multi-touch screens, but again, not really an annual event.
We switched to solid-stage storage. That probably opens doors to make streaming media off the disk more-practical; with rotational media, to do that, one had to have a pretty good idea of what one needed to load in advance to order it on-disk. But again, one-and-done.
Fully agreed. There is certainly much more need for solid stories and gameplay than there was before. A mid-level game could wow an audience when it incorporated new tech, but now making the trees slightly more leafy isn’t having the same effect.
Consoles – where a single console vendor can force an entire market to switch to a new input device, doesn’t have the collective action problem of PCs
The biggest changes that come to mind are the XBox camera which was quickly rejected by customers and the Wii pointer remote which didn’t survive to the next generation. Controller and mouse/keyboard just seem to work. Even with the collective action requirement removed, we return to these proven inputs.
To be fair, the remote was always just one-side of a controller, it didn’t change much, but they provided two things.
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a way to put them together into a controller format
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a first party controller with all the same mechanical features
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While I did put some time into a new game last year, I like my comfort games that I’ve played a million times before.
Was shocked to see how prolific retro gaming has become, then read the article summary lol
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The only recent blockbuster I can think of is Baldur’s Gate III. I (and many others) have certainly sunk a bunch of time into it, but, outside of that game, almost everything else is a good bit older.
recent
In a way BG3 has been out for years tho.
Lots of PC players pre-ordered to get act 1
Starfield, Diablo IV, Cyberpunk, AC games, COD games.
Starfield, Diablo IV, Cyberpunk, AC games, COD games.
None of these spark joy, with the possible exception of Cyberpunk, but that was simply an expansion. I’m more excited about the idea of replaying Subnautica for the fourth time than anything else on that list.
There haven’t really been many ‘blockbuster’ games coming out over the last couple of years either.
The metric isn’t sparking joy, whatever that means.
The only thing really on that list that didn’t come out to mixed reception at best is COD, and even that it’s getting some tired gamers. Scores by metacritic user rating
Starfield (6.9) - generally mixed due to being basically the same as but worse than Skyrim, released ~13 years later
Diablo 4 (2.3) - generally criticised for lack of improvement in 3 as well as shitty MTX. People are generally recommending indie titles instead.
Cyberpunk (7.1) - came out shit 4 years ago, only recently got fixed, still not entirely what was promised.
AC:Mirage (7.2) - is an explicit call back to the earlier games in the franchise and mostly criticised by its new audience built up from origins, odyssey, vslhalla that expect a long grindy experience and labelled it standalone dlc sold at full price. (it also isn’t sold on steam on PC, so I actually didn’t even know this existed. Especially given how the marketing looks like every other origins/odyssey/AC marketing ad)
Diablo 4 (2.3) - generally criticised for lack of improvement in 3 as well as shitty MTX. People are generally recommending indie titles instead.
That got review bombed, the critic reviews are 86/100, just like the other games you’ve mentioned. No way it’s worth 2.3 or 23%.
Regardless of the user reviews, they were all blockbuster/big titles. AC and COD are whatever games for me, but they’re super popular.
That’s fair, but let’s not pretend that sales determines quality, especially considering prevalence of blind preordering.
Final Fantasy XVI and Super Mario Wonder were two that played through last year into this year.
I even bought the latter, oops. Oh yeah, and the new Zelda.
My friends and I typically play two or three games in rotation, then we’ll each have a single-player title we play when nobody is online. For the past few months, it’s been a bunch of Helldivers, with some rocket league and fortnite music interspersed. Two of those games are technically over six years old. Before that, it was a bunch of deep rock galactic. I have been playing through sifu on my own time, and that’s pretty new and fun.
I guess that’s what happens with these addicting F2P games. If you look at the top 10, half are F2P.
I think it’s especially interesting that Switch games trend toward newer games, and only one (I think?) is F2P.
The switch is interesting because it probably has the most unique catalog. There are a lot of games you can only get on the switch and there are also a lot of games that are popular elsewhere but just don’t fit right with the switch ecosystem.
There haven’t really been many ‘blockbuster’ games coming out over the last couple of years either. Gone are the days of people getting hyped up for a new COD or what have you.
What about:
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Armored Core 6
- Lies of P
- Alan Wake 2
Those were all pretty big and well received, and released in the timeframe. But they don’t make the list, probably because they’re single player games and players tend to move on after completing them, whereas F2P games constantly have new content.
the worst time to play games is on their release. although I think this mainly refers to live service games
Not surprising. We went 6+ years without any good games. It’s looking up though. I haven’t bought helldivers yet but it looks really good. I just need to upgrade my PC
I still play csgo. Well csgo2 is fairly new and it’s good
Hmm…aside from live service games (released about 6~7 years ago), 100% of my play time has been games over 10 years old.
Oh wait, I played Mario RPG (a remake of a ~30-year old game), and some Super Mario Wonder…
I’m probably well beyond that criteria! Lol
