8 ms·

One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15 years or so). For example, you can s

One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15 years or so). For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary). But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no saving them, alas. So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased" streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming service dies, etc.).

corbulo 4y ago
Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering. Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!' Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at... By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Cyberpunk seems unrelated. It will probably age better than any other multiplayer title. The bugs have been patched but not game ruining (for me). T-posing was infrequent, but there were some issues.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game. It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time. I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      It's caused by ability to patch game later and rushing product to reach impossible deadline on an impossible configuration. Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.
      - corbulo 4y ago
        Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money by making any % of your consumer base hate you.
        Ygg2 4y ago
        If you don't release game by X date and for 5 year old consoles. Your stocks will definitely go down. And CDPR is a publicly traded company. For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable. For another similar example see Fallout 76.
        corbulo 4y ago
        Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints. It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  It's copy protection. You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature. Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets. If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it? This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    That, and planned-obselescence. I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers. Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5. Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM. Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
- iepathos 4y ago
  Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.
  - tomnipotent 4y ago
    And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042. 5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart. Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Bethesda doesn't even fix bugs in their own games even after rereleasing them 20 times, much less letting any other studio do it. Although they're both Microsoft now, so maybe it can happen.
      - account42 4y ago
        From now on, all Bethesda games will be bug-compatible with their older releases.
- ynx 4y ago
  Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying. Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is. Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam. "Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it. I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better. I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      I just finished playing half-life 2 in VR with a third party VR mod and it was amazing how well this game stood up to the test of time. There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Battlefield wasn't even EA's worst trainwreck. Look what happened to Anthem. I'd rather sink time into a shoestrung indie studio than anything EA wants to publish, after that.
- kehrin 4y ago
  Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.
- tekknik 4y ago
  > Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death. Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.
- sobkas 4y ago
  > Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.
duxup 4y ago
Maybe that’s really the place for that kind of service? I kinda like the idea of more open gaming type systems.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
Its never been easier to host a game server than it is today. We had to cohost and ship servers 20 years ago. There were some game hosting companies but they were usually bad performance for the price. Nowadays you can spin up a VM with a moments notice for a lot less money and investment and yet we are in the age of games not coming with dedicated server software.
antihipocrat 4y ago
Recently on a whim I downloaded HL2 and logged into the deathmatch lobby. There are still self hosted servers active with dozens of players duking it out. I joined in the fun, and for an hour I felt like I was 15 again, it's held up surprisingly well! If epic ever turns off the Fortnite server, it's just gone.
- Ntrails 4y ago
  I like to believe that someone somewhere is still playing wolfenstein:ET I had so much god damned fun playing that game
  - fer 4y ago
    It got recently released on Steam, so there's a large surge of players lately.
  - FrostKiwi 4y ago
    Wolfenstein:ET had and has a non-stop and alive playerbase and mapping scene. There are multiple communities hosting their modified Wolfenstein:ET version and making sure the different communities are reachable through one unified server browser.
    - McBeige 4y ago
      Is this an example of federation?
yazzku 4y ago
Indeed. It's a form of DRM if we take the R to mean 'restrictions', whether it's intentional or not. It just goes to show that all these publishers have no interest in making great games, but to simply milk players for a little while before moving on to the next thing. That and the loot boxes are the main reason I don't buy "modern" games anymore. I stash all my cash for GOG.
philippejara 4y ago
you're speaking of multiplayer games, which is true, but even single-player games will face this when they have denuvo, once the denuvo server goes out you're also unable to play your single player games. EMPRESS is the last line of defence.
x128 4y ago
Community servers are also great. You get to meet people and develop relationships with them as you play. Matchmaking just dumps you with a bunch of randos, half of which are going to be angry teens.
themitigating 4y ago
Isn't this just older games that are popular vs newer games that weren't?
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Specifically, matchmaking shutting down isn't too bad as long as hosting and Direct Connect still work : plenty of games that have lost their matchmaking by GameSpy shutting down have found a second MP life through third-party matchmaking services like Game Ranger. But do NOT buy games where MP doesn't work at all without official servers (or only through Steam MP or equivalent).
raincole 4y ago
> For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary). You make it sound like a good thing. And it indeed is for gamers. But it's the worse nightmare for established dev/pub that people play the old games, on their own servers, instead of your latest title. It actually happened quite a lot. Starcraft I was (is?) more popular than Starcraft II in Korea, where the biggest Starcraft E-sport scenes are. I recently learned that Red Alert II is still fairly popular today in China, and Red Alert III players don't exist. "How to out compete our previous title" is a real problem that established studios face. The lack of durability is a "solution".
- jdbernard 4y ago
  I'm glad we didn't have to worry about Mozart or Beethoven trying to bury their previous works so that they wouldn't have to compete with their previous titles. This seems like a perverse incentive unique to modern creative works.
  - raincole 4y ago
    Well without modern technology, you need a well-trained orchestra to replicate Symphone No.9. The marginal cost was a totally different beast at that time.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Well, you have to make a better title then. If people prefer Red Alert 2 to Red Alert 3, then it's not like Red Alert 3 somehow deserves or is entitled to any money or attention; it has to earn it by being a better, desirable product - and from the opposite side, the players are entitled to keep playing the older game forever, they paid for it fair and square.
jjav 4y ago
> One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones Not just games, it's really.. everything. I predict that a 100 years from now the collectors of old things of any kind will have a lot more from prior to 2000-2020 (depending on the item) than anything newer. Whether it is computers, electronics, games, cars, doesn't matter. All of them are becoming so dependent on third-party cloud services and phone apps that simply won't exist and will be impossible to recreate in a century. All that will survive is the older generation of products that did not depend on anything. Very sad.

corbulo 4y ago

Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering. Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!' Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at... By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.
Ygg2 4y ago
Cyberpunk seems unrelated. It will probably age better than any other multiplayer title. The bugs have been patched but not game ruining (for me). T-posing was infrequent, but there were some issues.
- corbulo 4y ago
  Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game. It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time. I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    It's caused by ability to patch game later and rushing product to reach impossible deadline on an impossible configuration. Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.
    - corbulo 4y ago
      Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money by making any % of your consumer base hate you.
      - Ygg2 4y ago
        If you don't release game by X date and for 5 year old consoles. Your stocks will definitely go down. And CDPR is a publicly traded company. For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable. For another similar example see Fallout 76.
        corbulo 4y ago
        Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints. It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.
oliwarner 4y ago
It's copy protection. You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature. Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets. If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it? This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That, and planned-obselescence. I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers. Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5. Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM. Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
iepathos 4y ago
Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.
- corbulo 4y ago
  The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042. 5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart. Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Bethesda doesn't even fix bugs in their own games even after rereleasing them 20 times, much less letting any other studio do it. Although they're both Microsoft now, so maybe it can happen.
    - account42 4y ago
      From now on, all Bethesda games will be bug-compatible with their older releases.
ynx 4y ago
Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying. Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is. Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam. "Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it. I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better. I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I just finished playing half-life 2 in VR with a third party VR mod and it was amazing how well this game stood up to the test of time. There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Battlefield wasn't even EA's worst trainwreck. Look what happened to Anthem. I'd rather sink time into a shoestrung indie studio than anything EA wants to publish, after that.
kehrin 4y ago
Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.
tekknik 4y ago
> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death. Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.
sobkas 4y ago
> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.

duxup 4y ago

Maybe that’s really the place for that kind of service? I kinda like the idea of more open gaming type systems.

PaulKeeble 4y ago

Its never been easier to host a game server than it is today. We had to cohost and ship servers 20 years ago. There were some game hosting companies but they were usually bad performance for the price. Nowadays you can spin up a VM with a moments notice for a lot less money and investment and yet we are in the age of games not coming with dedicated server software.

antihipocrat 4y ago

Recently on a whim I downloaded HL2 and logged into the deathmatch lobby. There are still self hosted servers active with dozens of players duking it out. I joined in the fun, and for an hour I felt like I was 15 again, it's held up surprisingly well! If epic ever turns off the Fortnite server, it's just gone.

Ntrails 4y ago
I like to believe that someone somewhere is still playing wolfenstein:ET I had so much god damned fun playing that game
- fer 4y ago
  It got recently released on Steam, so there's a large surge of players lately.
- FrostKiwi 4y ago
  Wolfenstein:ET had and has a non-stop and alive playerbase and mapping scene. There are multiple communities hosting their modified Wolfenstein:ET version and making sure the different communities are reachable through one unified server browser.
  - McBeige 4y ago
    Is this an example of federation?

yazzku 4y ago

Indeed. It's a form of DRM if we take the R to mean 'restrictions', whether it's intentional or not. It just goes to show that all these publishers have no interest in making great games, but to simply milk players for a little while before moving on to the next thing. That and the loot boxes are the main reason I don't buy "modern" games anymore. I stash all my cash for GOG.

philippejara 4y ago

you're speaking of multiplayer games, which is true, but even single-player games will face this when they have denuvo, once the denuvo server goes out you're also unable to play your single player games. EMPRESS is the last line of defence.

x128 4y ago

Community servers are also great. You get to meet people and develop relationships with them as you play. Matchmaking just dumps you with a bunch of randos, half of which are going to be angry teens.

themitigating 4y ago

Isn't this just older games that are popular vs newer games that weren't?

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Specifically, matchmaking shutting down isn't too bad as long as hosting and Direct Connect still work : plenty of games that have lost their matchmaking by GameSpy shutting down have found a second MP life through third-party matchmaking services like Game Ranger. But do NOT buy games where MP doesn't work at all without official servers (or only through Steam MP or equivalent).

raincole 4y ago

> For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary). You make it sound like a good thing. And it indeed is for gamers. But it's the worse nightmare for established dev/pub that people play the old games, on their own servers, instead of your latest title. It actually happened quite a lot. Starcraft I was (is?) more popular than Starcraft II in Korea, where the biggest Starcraft E-sport scenes are. I recently learned that Red Alert II is still fairly popular today in China, and Red Alert III players don't exist. "How to out compete our previous title" is a real problem that established studios face. The lack of durability is a "solution".

jdbernard 4y ago
I'm glad we didn't have to worry about Mozart or Beethoven trying to bury their previous works so that they wouldn't have to compete with their previous titles. This seems like a perverse incentive unique to modern creative works.
- raincole 4y ago
  Well without modern technology, you need a well-trained orchestra to replicate Symphone No.9. The marginal cost was a totally different beast at that time.
PeterisP 4y ago
Well, you have to make a better title then. If people prefer Red Alert 2 to Red Alert 3, then it's not like Red Alert 3 somehow deserves or is entitled to any money or attention; it has to earn it by being a better, desirable product - and from the opposite side, the players are entitled to keep playing the older game forever, they paid for it fair and square.

jjav 4y ago

> One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones Not just games, it's really.. everything. I predict that a 100 years from now the collectors of old things of any kind will have a lot more from prior to 2000-2020 (depending on the item) than anything newer. Whether it is computers, electronics, games, cars, doesn't matter. All of them are becoming so dependent on third-party cloud services and phone apps that simply won't exist and will be impossible to recreate in a century. All that will survive is the older generation of products that did not depend on anything. Very sad.