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Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents

Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.

littlehugie 5y ago
This. My kids Play minecraft on the Amazon Kids tablets. They startet with a older Version with only 1.5GB of RAM and the game kind of worked good enough for them to enjoy it. It worked for many years and only had Problems with large Outdoor areas. Now they use the newer 3GB kids Version and it works really well. I am very happy to not needing to buy them 400€ tablets for this game. (Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i tunded the Software until it does ;) )
mike50 5y ago
There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The difference is that Minecraft and Roblox were phenomenally successful and demonstrate the addressable market exists. Making games for a low-spec is one thing. Making games that people with low-spec computers want to play is another.
Mezzie 5y ago
There always were, there just wasn't the payment infrastructure to hoover up our parents' money in the 90s. I had to behave at computer shows and talk nicely to the adults about building computers before I was bought a video game (or make my parents drive me to a game store). Also they weren't full of micro-transactions. If there had been ways to buy games online + digital downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents' pocketbooks.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  I grew up in the 80s and would regularly get magazines on the weekly grocery shop with the demo cassette on them. The argument isn’t that videogames only just started to exist and that kids only just started to play them. It’s not really comparable because there wasn’t the ubiquity or range of compute power there is now. Modern games tend to nestle at the top of it as the parent comment suggests. There is a whole market of people that want to play games that have bad hardware. And my point is that there was a sea change about a decade ago in that respect that the wider industry is only just catching up to.

Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.

littlehugie 5y ago

This. My kids Play minecraft on the Amazon Kids tablets. They startet with a older Version with only 1.5GB of RAM and the game kind of worked good enough for them to enjoy it. It worked for many years and only had Problems with large Outdoor areas. Now they use the newer 3GB kids Version and it works really well. I am very happy to not needing to buy them 400€ tablets for this game. (Btw, i developed medical dicom viewer for large CT and MRI data, on a 10yrs old dell Laptop. The viewer was always fast on customer machines. If it would not work on my machine, i tunded the Software until it does ;) )

mike50 5y ago

There were tons and tons of similar games to mine craft with low system requirements. Also minecraft was originally written in Java ao it has the same issues as above.

meheleventyone 5y ago
The difference is that Minecraft and Roblox were phenomenally successful and demonstrate the addressable market exists. Making games for a low-spec is one thing. Making games that people with low-spec computers want to play is another.

Mezzie 5y ago

There always were, there just wasn't the payment infrastructure to hoover up our parents' money in the 90s. I had to behave at computer shows and talk nicely to the adults about building computers before I was bought a video game (or make my parents drive me to a game store). Also they weren't full of micro-transactions. If there had been ways to buy games online + digital downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents' pocketbooks.

meheleventyone 5y ago
I grew up in the 80s and would regularly get magazines on the weekly grocery shop with the demo cassette on them. The argument isn’t that videogames only just started to exist and that kids only just started to play them. It’s not really comparable because there wasn’t the ubiquity or range of compute power there is now. Modern games tend to nestle at the top of it as the parent comment suggests. There is a whole market of people that want to play games that have bad hardware. And my point is that there was a sea change about a decade ago in that respect that the wider industry is only just catching up to.