Older games are better (and still popular) because the devs pretty much had freedom to do what they wanted to do. In modern games the suits tell the devs what they have to do. That’s the point when the games started to suck.
I wouldn’t call a game that came out in 2023 “old”.
For publisher bottom lines, it absolutely would be!
Basically anything not purchased this fiscal quarter may as well be non-existent to them - hence the push towards reoccurring monetisation.
Meanwhile I’m currently (slowly) playing through a massive backlog of games from the 2010s, so I’m good!
The game I most recently bought is Trackmania United Forever, still $15 on sale even though it came out in 2008. I suppose my purchase of that is less though than of what they get from a user playing their new subscription based (!) racing game for a year.
Just 1 year can make certain genres ancient. Mostly multiplayer only titles, but also meme games.
I think most big budget multiplayer games last 2-5 years, but there are some (among us, fall guys, lethal company, etc) that pass pretty quickly, and some that are just bad enough that they are basically outdated already when they come out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if book readers spend 92% of their time on older books. Or if music listeners spend 92% of their time on older pieces.
Especially if “older” means two years or older.
According to the article, they mean 6 years old or older.
No, they said 67% at 6y or older, but 92% at more than 2 years old
Oh, okay. Seems odd to call a 2 year old game an “older” game.
Well, at 2 years it is probably older than at least one other game.
True, but literally any game can be an “older” game by that definition.
True, though both of those industries also use a hype cycle to try and shift new content at much higher prices, though every book and CD that ever existed is probably in a second-hand shop somewhere.
Their metric for “older” is two years or more.
- 7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
- 6.4% were in League of Legends
- 6.2% were in Roblox
- 5.8% were in Dota 2
- 5.4% were in Fortnite
Proud to say I don’t play any of those. Screw live service games, there are plenty of other gems out there to keep me entertained.
I’d say don’t yuck someone’s yum but I tried league of legends years ago and it’s why I avoid any game that makes me interact with strangers.
Valve have worked so hard to disgust me away from dota 2, they’re so real for this ❤️
- zero-k
- wz2100
- agar.io
- WoW
The latter two are on-line, but the brain wants what the brain wants.
I think the only games I’ve played in the last month or so have been Trackmania United Forever and bonk.io
zero-k
Have you tried Beyond All Reason? Personally I liked it more than zero-k.
I’m building an arcade stand I can put in front of my TV so I can play emulated games with my kids. I could not care less about most of the new games coming out these days.
GPU prices priced me out of the top of the PC gaming market, got new hobbies now.
What counts as an “older game?” Surely not… thinks about the games I played last week …Tie Fighter or Dune 2?
Actual answer:
The data shows that from January 2024 to December 2024, 67% of player hours on PC were spent on a game that was six or more years old. A further 25% of player hours were spent on games that were two to five years old, and the remaining 8% of time was spent on games that are less than two years old.
Sample:
The results are extrapolated from a yearly in-depth survey of 73,000 players, alongside data from over 10,000 games
More than 5 years old includes all the major live service titles at this point, back in the day people would be hopping to whatever new COD/Battlefield just came out, which would lock that metric to 2-3 years max. Since Moore’s law is long dead at this point the technology just doesn’t improve much year over year, and it’s hard to sell a new minor iteration on a game without flashy visual upgrades, the old model just doesn’t really make sense anymore.
Yes, that is the main point the article makes
New games have very little offer me, apart from higher specs I’d have to upgrade for. Just played through Prey and the two Dishonoreds, and they’re good but still just revamps of System Shock 2 and Thief, so I don’t regret not paying them at the time. The really groundbreaking games nowadays tend to be indie anyway.
Baldur’s Gate 2 forever. 🖤
Dark Alliance for me lately
Been playing that one on PS5 lately. I feel bad for neglecting BG3, but it’s such an investment, and I know I’ll get distracted.
I need to try that after I make my way through Planescape. I started BG1, but it just didn’t jibe with me all that much, which apparently is true for a lot of people. I probably should’ve just jumped to BG2.
I ended up going back to the first one after I finished the second one. It has its charm, and a pretty good story. level cap and the difficulty is what makes it a bit hard.
I think the power curve of the 2nd one really hits when you started off with your character in the first game killing rats in a basement.
As an aside I started Seige Of Dragonspear reecently because it was really cheap on Android and I was stuck on a long bus journey. I think it’s actually pretty decent and potentially would be a good starting point if BG1 was too slow. So far the writing has been similar to the other two games albeit not quite on par. There is no tutorial on the mechanics or anything like that though.
Edit: One thing about BG1 is that it can be absolutely fucking brutal in an old school way. I was in Chapter 5 in the eponymous Baldurs Gate and a sidequest triggered where an NPC told me they had poisoned my entire party and I needed to follow them to an alleyway to get the cure. I assumed this was a ruse and my party was going to get mugged/jumped in the alley.
Fast-forward to 4 hours of gameplay later, 2 weeks of in-game time. I was on Chapter 7 on my way to confront Saverok and my entire party keeled over and died. Turned out they actually had been poisoned and none of my stacked saves went far enough back to go and complete the sidequest to avoid the poisoning. So I was totally soft-locked with no way to complete the game by conventional means.
Dungeon Keeper 4 lyfe
Another amazing one.
Ohhh, and the original Diablo. Tristram was such a familiar place after a while.
I fucking love bullfrogs stuff so much. That and worldbuilders like Pharaoh, Rise of the middle kingdom, zeus, etc…
Dungeon Keeper 2 is good in its own way but definitely lost some of its original magic.
There was an indie series called Overlord (I think, can’t quite recall) which tried to be a Cities: Skyline type homage to Dungeon Keeper. I played it many years ago and it did scratch the same itch so you might be interested.
Yeah dk2 was just… overly complicated and ugly. The story behind it’sfascinating, it really was a rush incomplete job.
War for the overworld was the spiritual sucession, it’s fantastic. But if your heart is for the original, keeperfx.
“Buffy Oak. A small location where the people just sit around all day and enjoy each other’s company. They talk, laugh, and sing without ever arguing, drawing daggers, and dying in a gurgling rush of blood. A truly bizarre place.”
I should do another run soon. Maybe add some more mods this time…
That’s my go-to “storyline” game. I have so many great (and terrible—thanks, Lich) memories of that game.
I picked it up on a whim, not knowing a single thing about it. Next thing you know, I’m collecting every Black Isle/BG game and spinoff.
I’m still sad the source code of IWD2 was lost and we’ll never get an official Enhanced Edition (for all my hate of Beamdog and their writing and fanfic insertion the updated engine and QOL work they’ve done is quite nice).
Love to see metrics im apart of. I only play TF2, Minecraft and emulate PS2 games nowadays.
I’ve been playing Unreal Gold from 1998. I never finished it.
There is something satisfying about going back and cranking Far Cry 2 or some other older game to max settings / 4k with an extremely modest GPU.
Played left 4 dead 2 last night with friends. Still awesome
Still hate spitters though.
PvP jockeys are the real menace
A lot of my friends weren’t into the shift from Fallout 3’s third person open world to the original game’s isometric perspective; Understandable, but that’s what I grew up on. I enjoy revisiting 1 & 2 every other year or so. Also, Sid Meiers Pirates hadn’t adapted well to modern systems, but has a clean gameplay loop that I enjoy revisiting.
Sid Meiers Pirates
This game rocks.
I’m playing Bloodborne for the first time (emulator). Before that I was playing Far Cry 1 for the first time as well. Far cry was much harder, so far at least.
What emulator are you using? Only one I’ve seen was PCSX4 and according to a lot of stuff I saw online, it’s a pretty outright scam
Yea ShadPS4 is great. PCSX4 is a scam not sure why thats even a thing.
ShadPS4 has become usable for bloodborne within the last year or so. Runs 60fps on decent hardware
I was never able to get it to work. Always get stuck on a black screen while loading. I keep trying with new shad builds once a month or so.
Thats too bad, I got it working on Linux with 0.5.0 iirc
I at least own it on PlayStation, so I’m not one of the unfortunate people who can’t play at all.
Still, that 60fps sure looks nice.
What makes it a scam?
It’s not an actual emulator, it doesn’t work. When you try to download it, it makes you fill surveys that make the scammers money. It has a fake github, with a changelog copied from PCSX2 (a legit PS2 emulator), changing the 2 to a 4.
Far Cry 1 is the best one! It was made by crytek, the same studio that did Crysis. I still occasionally go back to replay that game. It’s really fun.
Far Cry 1 was amazing, but so were 2 and 3. The first 3 were all something really special. 4 and 5 were cool too, but the first 3 were really unique at the time.
I love the atmosphere of all of them, and 2 felt really revolutionary at the time. I kind of wanna play some Far Cry 2 again some time soon, I’ve been feeling like taking in some of the African atmosphere of it, especially since I’ve got the travel bug recently and I don’t know if I’ll ever visit Africa in real life.
My favorite aspect was the B-movie feel to the whole thing. I was dying when my character got punted right in the face out of a flying helicopter. I wish I could find more games with some humor like that.
