27 ms·

What's inaccurate? I'm almost 28 and describing what was true for me at the time as a Dutch citizen, between international online payments being harder to make

What's inaccurate? I'm almost 28 and describing what was true for me at the time as a Dutch citizen, between international online payments being harder to make until 2010 or so and PC games not getting much space at nearby toy stores.

mgaunard 3y ago
Video games were already widely accessible all over Europe in the 90s, so were personal computers and specialized shops were you could buy parts to assemble your computer yourself. There was also a big culture of downloading games illegally, and I remember people were trading burned CDs at school -- it was a big thing to have a CD burner then. While it was certainly not legal, it contributed greatly to the spreading of niche, foreign or rare games. By 2000 personal computers had become sufficiently cheap that many people had individual computers rather than family ones. Windows 98 had made them accessible to everyone, and XP which followed up was truly the beginning of everyone having a computer. The concept of a "gaming PC" doesn't really make sense, any PC can play games, and it only costs 100-200 euros to upgrade relevant parts to play the latest games on high graphics settings (but as we all know, graphics don't matter anyway). I guess it's a concept that appeared with the new generation being unable to assemble parts. The time period you speak of, the mid-2000s, was actually the end of an era and the beginning of mainstream over-marketed gaming, and a general dumbing down and drop in the quality of video games. I guess it also came with the rise of "digital purchases", but digital didn't really fully take over until the 2020s. For a long time Internet connections were not sufficiently good to download games on a massive scale, which is also part of the reason why people reselling copies was popular. As for the difficulty of online payments, I don't buy it. First, you could always go physical, and second, the Netherlands were part of the eurozone since 1999, so hardly isolated in currency or financial systems. I remember buying stuff online in 1999 from other European shops, and it was indeed much easier than in pre-euro times.
- Vertette 3y ago
  We weren't a very rich family so there wasn't much money to dive into that computer assembly jazz, that's why it took until my brother moved out that we had money to buy a machine specifically built to be good at running games, which is what I meant by gaming PC. I don't know where you get this idea that everyone had their own computer by the year 2000 because I did know families who had that but they were definitely making more money than average. And again I want to stress that the stores near me didn't have many PC games and online payments were a much bigger pain for us until iDeal got more international support. Maybe there were cheap dedicated PC game stores and hardware stores and easy digital payment systems (read: not PayPal) but if so I wasn't aware of them and didn't know who to ask about it. What does it matter anyway? This was the situation for me as I remember it and I got little reason to lie as it's just a flavorful intro to an analysis into a game I love and want to talk about.

mgaunard 3y ago

Video games were already widely accessible all over Europe in the 90s, so were personal computers and specialized shops were you could buy parts to assemble your computer yourself. There was also a big culture of downloading games illegally, and I remember people were trading burned CDs at school -- it was a big thing to have a CD burner then. While it was certainly not legal, it contributed greatly to the spreading of niche, foreign or rare games. By 2000 personal computers had become sufficiently cheap that many people had individual computers rather than family ones. Windows 98 had made them accessible to everyone, and XP which followed up was truly the beginning of everyone having a computer. The concept of a "gaming PC" doesn't really make sense, any PC can play games, and it only costs 100-200 euros to upgrade relevant parts to play the latest games on high graphics settings (but as we all know, graphics don't matter anyway). I guess it's a concept that appeared with the new generation being unable to assemble parts. The time period you speak of, the mid-2000s, was actually the end of an era and the beginning of mainstream over-marketed gaming, and a general dumbing down and drop in the quality of video games. I guess it also came with the rise of "digital purchases", but digital didn't really fully take over until the 2020s. For a long time Internet connections were not sufficiently good to download games on a massive scale, which is also part of the reason why people reselling copies was popular. As for the difficulty of online payments, I don't buy it. First, you could always go physical, and second, the Netherlands were part of the eurozone since 1999, so hardly isolated in currency or financial systems. I remember buying stuff online in 1999 from other European shops, and it was indeed much easier than in pre-euro times.

Vertette 3y ago
We weren't a very rich family so there wasn't much money to dive into that computer assembly jazz, that's why it took until my brother moved out that we had money to buy a machine specifically built to be good at running games, which is what I meant by gaming PC. I don't know where you get this idea that everyone had their own computer by the year 2000 because I did know families who had that but they were definitely making more money than average. And again I want to stress that the stores near me didn't have many PC games and online payments were a much bigger pain for us until iDeal got more international support. Maybe there were cheap dedicated PC game stores and hardware stores and easy digital payment systems (read: not PayPal) but if so I wasn't aware of them and didn't know who to ask about it. What does it matter anyway? This was the situation for me as I remember it and I got little reason to lie as it's just a flavorful intro to an analysis into a game I love and want to talk about.