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Why old games never die, but new ones do

• ChoGGi 1y ago
  One of the listed games being CS 1.6 is only around because Valve didn't shutdown the master server. As EA/Ubisoft et al. are inclined to do. So it certainly could've and still readily could.
• V__ 1y ago
  I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
• mattnewton 1y ago
  The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation. Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lindy%20effect%20(also%20known,proportional%20to%20their%20current%20age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
  • gmuslera 1y ago
    I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games"). You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
    • secstate 1y ago
      I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • pasta67 1y ago
      I was so looking for this type of comment. There is no survivor bias, you [insert insult]! So many of those games were really bad even at their time. BUT YOU CAN STILL PLAY THEM. I've tossed many games out of my catalogue and for some I wished they vanish from existence and they all have survived! While article is recycling narrative - it has a reason, but your recycled opinion is not only wrong but has no reason other than lowkey nitpick article.
      • gmuslera 1y ago
        Oh, but there are "surviving" games, as they are still popular, and remixed, and emulated, and things like that. You have a Doom, a Tetris, Pacmans, Marios, even you have new editions of the series of the Monkey Island. That is one way to see surviving, still present, played, and with enough exposure in the media to still have a decent enough player base. And then you have curiosity items that may be in big bags of old games that are tried, discarded, but they are essentially forgotten. That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
  • xboxnolifes 1y ago
    Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.
    • CoastalCoder 1y ago
      I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600. Now that game was worth every byte.
    • jghn 1y ago
      Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1] [1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Whore+House.html https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
      • dragonmost 1y ago
        Well now i gotta find a way to play this
        • adjagu 1y ago
          There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1]. 1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adventure_19xx_- https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
  • bitwize 1y ago
    One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?! This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games. The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
    • platevoltage 1y ago
      Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
      • bitwize 1y ago
        Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
        • platevoltage 1y ago
          As someone who these days enjoys watching other people play bad games, or play good games wrong (speed running, or just making comedic content), I'm definitely not down to play that horrific garbage. I might go rewatch AVGN do it though.
      • spacechild1 1y ago
        I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.
  • CrossVR 1y ago
    Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
    • Spivak 1y ago
      Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games. Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
      • Discordian93 1y ago
        You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube anymore.
        • GLabrie 1y ago
          There are private servers that you can connect to, no? I remember reading about it not that long ago!
        • chmod775 1y ago
          https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv
        • rawling 1y ago
          Even all the offline content?
        • wtetzner 1y ago
          You can, and you can even play it with Dreamcast and PC players: https://sylverant.net/ https://sylverant.net/
        • Firehawke 1y ago
  • strken 1y ago
    If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?" I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • vitehozonage 1y ago
    Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point. It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification. Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change. Just today there was a new article that shows this: >That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger." https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maestro-says-ea-always-spoke-about-a-hypothetical-nerd-cave-full-of-die-hard-rpg-fans-who-would-always-show-up-so-you-didnt-have-to-try-and-appeal-to-them/ https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
    • mancerayder 1y ago
      Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty. They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book. We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
  • paulddraper 1y ago
    Also known as “survivorship bias” [1] Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
  • jmyeet 1y ago
    You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying. Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden. But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future. I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s. Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
    • klodolph 1y ago
      Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine. Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
      • tzs 1y ago
        People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations. Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
        • 1y ago
  • AlecSchueler 1y ago
    At the same time you still see projects like Beating Every N64 Game [0], so there's evidence that there's still interest even in the absolute worst games on the old consoles. 0: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4dUV9sTbGr https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    >is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation. I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory: Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7. If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
    • thiht 1y ago
      There are plenty of games made in the last years that will be remembered 10 years from now. The Horizon series comes to mind. Games need time to become classics, because we need time to realize how impactful they were and how much they live in our memories.
    • abenga 1y ago
      This just sounds like everyone remembering music/movies/other art that came out when we were coming of age extremely fondly. Young people starting to game now will remember a different set of games from you.
      • Barrin92 1y ago
        It's intellectually lazy to attribute any judgement of media to nostalgia, and inappropriate in this case. Young people are the best example of this. If you look at what past games the current teenagers are interested in, it actually is games from the early console era. Even in game art it's evident. Great indie titles, see for example Animal Well or Celeste harken back to the pixelart era, nobody emulates ca 2009 3d realism. Because artistically it just looks uninspired. There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium. This applies to film as well. The last fifteen years have largely been dreadful and nobody is going to remember dozens of conveyor belt produced Marvel slop films. People will still watch Coppola and Kubrick in 30 years. And that's btw 20-30 years before I was born, you see my birthdate in my username. I don't appeal to "what I remember" when looking at media.
  • t-3 1y ago
    There's also a big heaping helping of "many titles, same game". There's no reason to buy a new game when it's the same as the old game, but with half the functionality hidden in DLCs where the older title will have that from the start and likely be mod-friendly to boot.
  • zx10rse 1y ago
    I don't think it is a generational thing or a lindy effect plain, and simple greed is what is killing modern day games. Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc. There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again. It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
    • duckmysick 1y ago
      There are indie games without those in-app purchases that capture the spirit of the old games.
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
        Yes, these games are definitely out there. Makes me want to go through my Steam library; I’m sure I could list off dozens of games but I’ll just stick with one great example that comes to mind: Axiom Verge.
    • MattRix 1y ago
      The idea that there’s nothing to these games just isn’t true. Take Fortnite, the quintessential “modern game” that popularized battle passes. You don’t need a battle pass to play, in fact all purchasable things are purely cosmetic: they offer no gameplay value. Nobody is playing Fortnite for the cosmetics, they’re playing it because it’s fun! Why would you care about cosmetics in a game you don’t enjoy playing? It makes no sense. “no depth”: patently false. Fortnite is one of the highest skill ceiling games around. “no cool mechanics”: there are tons of cool mechanics, both at a gameplay level and meta level, with more being cycled in every season. “no story”: admittedly the story is a bit opaque, but the community loves the big story events that happen every season. “no easter eggs or secrets”: Sure there are! Each new season is filled with them, and there are entire wikis dedicated to cataloguing them.
  • Xelbair 1y ago
    you're forgetting that modern games REQUIRE company releasing them to host a server, and there are no ways to host a community one. Some of them take enormous effort to create a fan server if it is even possible - as some games stream assets serverside, and if that isn't captured in some way beforehand... you can still play those old "bad" games, they still exist.
  • komali2 1y ago
    Certainly people talk the most about the best games of a given generation, but I recently loaded up a 3ds with basically the top 50 games for it, then another 30 or so DS generation games, and so on down through GBA, GBC, SNES, NES... hundreds and hundreds of games I'm enjoying way more than some of the most played games of this generation e.g. Call of Duty or Fortnite. So not to be an old fart but I think previous generations really were spoiled by a much better on average library. Then again there are many phenomenal indie games coming out lately. Some of the best games, in my opinion, of the last 30 years, came out this decade: Outer Wilds and Animal Well, for example.
  • safety1st 1y ago
    What's different is that new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy. The game won't function unless it can phone home, stream assets etc. from their server, and they can and do plan to shut that server off at some point, forcing you to move on and buy new games. Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think Netflix and the streaming industry in general aspires to convert movies into a planned obsolescence business model; in the beginning Netflix's selling point was that they had an archive of every DVD ever made, but now increasingly they're conditioning us to expect that stuff's going to leave the platform sooner or later. Why? If all we watch are the classics there's not much point to keep subscribing to a streaming service, just download/buy the classics, and then you're done. They are having trouble with this however because the movies they put out just aren't as good as the older stuff; I've read the data indicates that people are mostly watching 90s stuff on Netflix, so they can't purge it from the platform just yet. But they will try. The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel. They switched to a planned obsolescence model one day and we just went along with it.
    • sidewndr46 1y ago
      Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord
      • darthcircuit 1y ago
        [dead]
      • DrillShopper 1y ago
        Live service shooters usually have a very short lifespan unless they can displace Overwatch, Valorent, Fortnite, or Destiny Even Halo (Infinite) couldn't manage it Stop buying this kind of game if you are expecting game preservation from one of the worst studios running.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
  • CivBase 1y ago
    This is simply wrong. Obscure and commercially unsuccessful games still work today, although it might be difficult to find the hardware needed to run them. Even the successful games of today are likely to die eventually. Ubisoft's The Crew was relatively successful, but they shut down the servers and made the game unplayable. Now they're talking about at least adding an "offline mode" but core features of the game would still be unavailable to the customers who bought it. The difference with games today is that many are designed to require a connection to company servers - and those servers cannot be self-hosted. Eventually it won't be profitable for the company to continue running those servers and they'll shut them down. Unless companies are forced to provide an EOL plan that allows customers to continue playing the games they bought (could be self-hosted servers, open source, patching out the server requirement, etc), modern games will continue to die at an increasing rate.
  • veunes 1y ago
    Having the same thought... The games we still play today weren't just "old," they were exceptional and had communities passionate enough to keep them alive
• DarkNova6 1y ago
  A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work. While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation. Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors. Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
  • nntwozz 1y ago
    This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands. It was more of a monoculture. https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.
    • parpfish 1y ago
      i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content. if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want? letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else? would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
• Buttons840 1y ago
  We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.) The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it. Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
  • unclad5968 1y ago
    Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
    • ndriscoll 1y ago
      Incorrect question. The correct question is assuming people are willing to share those old games for free (they are), why should we grant someone the right to stop them? Why should we grant people the right to block the creation of derivatives of 40 year old works? These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
    • lesser23 1y ago
      Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation? Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain. Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games. Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
      • Uvix 1y ago
• ivape 1y ago
  The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
  • esseph 1y ago
    Kinda. There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      I think it is somewhat true for certain crowd. Like say tv series that are run on schedule. There is certain amount of shared existence when everyone is watching or playing at same time even with single player games. On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
  • sph 1y ago
    The recent wave of early-access indie co-op horror games is proof of that (i.e. Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Backrooms, R.E.P.O., etc.). They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
• joshvm 1y ago
  AMD recently annoyed the gaming community - who are among the most susceptible to unnecessary upgraditis - by saying that friends don't let friends buy GPUs with more than 8GB VRAM. If you look at the Steam hardware surveys, that's probably true. An M-series Macbook can play most stuff that isn't current AAA. Proton let's you play virtually anything on Linux and it's incredible (plus the Steam Deck). There's no point buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service. Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable. Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
  • bitwize 1y ago
    To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date. Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating. In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • wtallis 1y ago
    Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.
• john-h-k 1y ago
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Survivorship-bias.svg/960px-Survivorship-bias.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Su...
• xeromal 1y ago
  I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is: >Server Hosting and LAN play
• squigz 1y ago
  How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming? > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience. Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
  • charcircuit 1y ago
    >Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
    • bigfatkitten 1y ago
      This is probably a regional thing, but in my experience they're in decline. The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
      • mabster 1y ago
        In Australia we used to have a few arcades dotted around the place but I haven't walked past one in a long time. But whenever I go to Japan I'm amazed at how vibrant their arcade scene is. It seems much more communal as well - go hang out at the arcade with your friends.
• BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk. Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
  • pimlottc 1y ago
    Even without matchmaking issues, it can be difficult for new players to break into a community of diehards who have often been playing together for years.
    • laconicmatt 1y ago
      This perfectly encapsulates the new Fatal Fury game. It's such a great new release but all the Fatal Fury old heads absolutely obliterate any new players, especially players from more popular backgrounds like Street Fighter or GG Strive.
• fnordpiglet 1y ago
  This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply survivor bias.
  • johnb231 1y ago
    From the article: "Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
    • reddalo 1y ago
      Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July. I don't know how to spread the word about it...
  • whstl 1y ago
    Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived. I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember. Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adventure_19xx_- https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
• ofcourseyoudo 1y ago
  "Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it." This is laughably untrue. But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine: - Fortnite - Apex Legends - Valorant - Overwatch - COD - League - Dota 2 - Roblox Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
  • cempaka 1y ago
    At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      Well 1 person just now running the game. And 3 simultaneously today... Does 3 count as people? Steam's statistics are kinda wild at times.
  • adwf 1y ago
    Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context: Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017) Apex Legends: February 4, 2019 Valorant: June 2, 2020 Overwatch: May 24, 2016 Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release League of Legends: October 27, 2009 Dota 2: July 9, 2013 Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year) Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
    • leecommamichael 1y ago
      I will not blame an LLM, I will blame your laziness for repeating a message you didn't verify.
      • johnisgood 1y ago
        I know, right?! People misuse a valuable tool and blame the tool for it.
• protocolture 1y ago
  >It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
• jokoon 1y ago
  I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real. I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
  • candiddevmike 1y ago
    IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.
    • const_cast 1y ago
      It also opened the door to more stylistic choices. There's only one way to do realism - realistically. There's infinite ways to do low graphics. Maybe you do a Wind Waker type look, maybe you do a Binding of Isaac type look, maybe you do a Don't Starve type look. All wildly different aesthetics, but all pretty low-graphics. This is part of the reason, I think, Nintendo games seem to have more soul. The consoles are limited and, in turn, Nintendo dedicates more effort to make their games look stylistically good. Mario Odyssey doesn't have great graphics, but it looks fantastic. Ditto for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile, Concord, Battlefield, COD... they all kind of blend together.
  • antifa 1y ago
    Low Poly is a market signal for not-filled-with-microtranactions in addition to nostalgia. Plus, a tiny indie dev team who is passionate (not greedy) can do a coherent art design around low poly, whereas anything higher might 100x the work/budget required to make the game look like it's not a salad of random disjointed asset packs.
• __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
• firesteelrain 1y ago
  I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
• BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" : https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-requirements-are-doomed-according-to-stop-killing-games-survey https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req... (Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
  • reddalo 1y ago
    I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.
• sandspar 1y ago
  People are pointing out that it's survivorship bias, which is true. But you also have to admit that the game development meta has changed. Microtransactions, gambling, FOMO... it seems like games have gotten more psychological. Like, gamers are being targeted psychologically, using the same sophisticated influence techniques used by casinos or bars or whatever. People haven't caught on that modern researchers have basically "solved" some aspects of human psychology. Especially the aspects that cause us to spend money and to pay attention to things. People also haven't put 2 and 2 together that we're now using these techniques on children.
  • selivanovp 1y ago
    Old games were created to tell you a story, or surprise you with unusual environment, or unique gameplay, or some mix of above. These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
• wileydragonfly 1y ago
  For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen. But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
  • TheJoeMan 1y ago
    I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  Increasingly, games are more like events, in the past they weren’t. What you pay for is really like a ticket to participate. If you’re not playing a game with people right when it’s new, when the hype is at its peak, you will miss out on the shared experience and social conversation. There are many games out there you could only have experienced at their full potential for a limited time. You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death. You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
  • leecommamichael 1y ago
    Thanks for the refreshing read. In reality, when we play with each other in person, it tends to feel this way. The moment comes and goes. Maybe you had a great game of cards over beers with friends. That doesn't mean every game needs beers and cards. (Although honestly I don't see how that could go wrong with a good group)
• BlueTemplar 1y ago
  > the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists. "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier. It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
  • wiether 1y ago
    > "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
    • BlueTemplar 1y ago
      Maybe, but I can't recall a game having separate buttons for these : so it's Direct IP connect with maybe LAN advertising (it would make more sense as a checkbox). (Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
• zeroq 1y ago
  The biggest problem today is ownership. There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only. You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place. I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity. Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them. Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them. And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro). All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now. I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
  • squigz 1y ago
    > Some of those games are single player only. Like which?
    • ThunderSizzle 1y ago
      I know Command and Conquer 4 and Sim City (2013) both required server access at launch to run single player. CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
• tombert 1y ago
  I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it. I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books. But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that. Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff. Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer. GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam. It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner. [1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
  • Uvix 1y ago
    How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?
    • tombert 1y ago
      I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
      • Uvix 1y ago
        I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that... If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
• protocolture 1y ago
  Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility. Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe. Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity. WoW has Mangos.
• curtisszmania 1y ago
  [dead]
• overgard 1y ago
  I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok. I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
  • luisgvv 1y ago
    You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations. As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game. I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
    • epolanski 1y ago
      +1 I can relate completely. I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before. I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
    • hulitu 1y ago
      > As for shooters this is the same. Worse. Why do i need to chat with a character in a FPS ? This is not an RPG.
    • MrJagil 1y ago
      I play dota 1 again now! https://firstbloodgaming.com/ https://firstbloodgaming.com/
• dartharva 1y ago
  Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach. As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
  • leecommamichael 1y ago
    You conveniently ignored all but the first sentence, didn't you? I can respect that, but it is mostly an article about multiplayer games.
    • dartharva 1y ago
      > it is mostly an article about multiplayer games Changes nothing about what I said. Plenty of very good multiplayer games out there.
• 999900000999 1y ago
  I want FOSS alternatives for every genre. I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started. Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core. I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
  • joshlemer 1y ago
    I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
  • azalemeth 1y ago
    Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
    • johnisgood 1y ago
      Nexuiz is still alive? There is OpenArena too, and lots of ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous, Urban Terror, etc.
      • okwhateverdude 1y ago
        Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.
• nottorp 1y ago
  He means "multiplayer games" though. Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
• pabs3 1y ago
  It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
• alkonaut 1y ago
  Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
• larusso 1y ago
  The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game. I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
  • cocoto 1y ago
    The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!
    • larusso 1y ago
      You are right. I know that. That’s why I stay away from this and buy consoles. Only that they creeped in the same setup. One to play in better quality pay more. Or take the pedestrian version.
  • johnb231 1y ago
    $3000 on overpriced junk. Any more than $1500 is a waste of money. It's really not that complicated. Just buy a mid range PC with a cheap 1080p gaming monitor and play the games.
• Farbklex 1y ago
  It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well. I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
• hyperman1 1y ago
  The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that. The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live. Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
  • sharperguy 1y ago
    Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.
• tobylane 1y ago
  My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did. Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
• Dove 1y ago
  It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples. Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected. Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again. All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love. For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts. That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
  • BSDobelix 1y ago
    The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine. >Why do video games kinda suck now Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
  • sandspar 1y ago
    Interesting perspective. What media would you say is in its golden age today?
    • Dove 1y ago
• consistentlytop 1y ago
  Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming. And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them? It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase. And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
• ololobus 1y ago
  The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then. Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons: 1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well 2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc. 3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great. UPD: formatting
• wcoenen 1y ago
  Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually. First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
  • boredhedgehog 1y ago
    UT99 is being maintained with a community patch: * https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches Is that the one you used?
    • wcoenen 1y ago
      We used "Unreal Tournament: Game of the year edition" from Steam[1]. This was in December 2023. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/13240/Unreal_Tournament_Game_of_the_Year_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/13240/Unreal_Tournament_G...
  • Firehawke 1y ago
    Yeah, no, you need to run the community patch. As noted before in the article, it's being actively maintained by the community. You wouldn't expect a 1.0 launch version to run well in 2025.
• POM37 1y ago
  Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
• coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
  • leecommamichael 1y ago
    Yeah, the entire article isn't clickbait but they make several very controversial statements in it. It's just talking about multiplayer games. The author isn't exactly a great communicator.
• gmerc 1y ago
  Old games being available has stopped enshittification and value extraction from VC and PE. The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user. The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore. Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog. MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam. The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
  • squigz 1y ago
    > MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam. No it's not. Game Pass is very popular even with people like me who are massive fans of Steam. And it's been pretty successful for quite a few years now, so not sure what you mean by "trying to"
    • bombcar 1y ago
      Game Pass is for those willing to admit that an all-you-can-play buffet is fine enough for most people. Steam is for collectors who want to pretend that someday they’ll play their backlog. At least digital hoarding is easier for the kids to throw away.
  • qiine 1y ago
    > The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control sadly true, it's almost comical how all other major game company can't seem to grasp why steam is so successful.
• agumonkey 1y ago
  This era is also hectic .. more games, more often, more of everything. Hard to go deep into one thing maybe.
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  There are lots of new games that will never die. Look at Nintendo games.
• throw7 1y ago
  I don't disagree per se with any of the OP's points, but back in the day I know why I started to dislike newer ones... the console era became "tier 1" and PC became "tier 2". Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter". Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios. Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing. That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
• AlienRobot 1y ago
  Another important point about old games is their file size. When games are under 1 megabyte, you can literally cram thousands of games in a thumb drive and forget about it. It makes them resilient. Someone probably has a copy of the abandonware not because it looked worth preserving but because it was extremely cheap to preserve. By contrast, if your game is several gigabytes, that's several orders of magnitude more expensive to preserve and distribute.
• iFire 1y ago
  New AAA games are less viable if they can be cracked to delete their live service.
• everyone 1y ago
  https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
  • CivBase 1y ago
    If you're an EU citizen and care about video game preservation, I highly suggest joining the European Union Citizen's Initiative in this link. Even if you don't care about video games, it could end up having pro-consumer ramifications for software ownership in general if it manages to go anywhere. For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI
• throwawaybob420 1y ago
  Right off the bat the author determines that all recent video games are “disposable pieces of slop”. Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games? Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day. There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
• xchip 1y ago
  MSX games were terrible, that is what pushed me into programming, a game I'm still playing. I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
• veunes 1y ago
  Honestly, it's depressing to think how much creativity and community we've lost just because publishers want everything to be a closed garden with a checkout line
• calibas 1y ago
  > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia: "The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry. Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
• leecommamichael 1y ago
  1. The article is about multiplayer games, not all games (as the headline would imply.) 2. I thought they might be talking about design decisions that make for "lasting fun" but really they're advocating for design decisions that afford the game being functioning software without the corporate entity which produced it continuing to breathe life (and money) into it. I think it's fine that things die. Also my god that first line is a flaming hot take. > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
• jakubmazanec 1y ago
  My favourite old games I like to replay every few years: Jagged Alliance 2 (with the great v1.13 mod) and Railroad Tycoon 2.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sumeno 1y ago
  Just the opening paragraph of this article is pure hogwash > It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. There are absolutely incredible games still being made across genres. BG3, Hades, Clair Obscur, Celeste, the Horizon series, Balatro, Void Stranger, Elden Ring, these are all examples of all time great games in their respective genres and they all came out in the last 10 years. > Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties Final Fantasy XI is still around and it's been going for over 20 years. WoW and FFXIV are as well. You can quibble over what "modern" means, but WoW and FFXIV are still getting full expansions and even FFXI got new content as recently as 2023. > Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience. Some have, but there are absolutely games that have not fallen into this trap. It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts from such an unserious place
  • CivBase 1y ago
    WoW and FFXIV would fall into the author's "live service" category.
    • sumeno 1y ago
      Neither of those are driven by free updates and paid for with microtransactions
  • bombcar 1y ago
    Balatro is a perfect example of a game that could easily have been made in the 90s, perhaps even the 80s, and yet it’s brand new and really has no similar competitors from that era. There’s still new things to build.
• pflenker 1y ago
  That article suffers from a strong case of survivorship bias. Yes, old games die, they go away and are long forgotten - only very few „never die“. The same is true for new ones. Since the barrier to create games is way lower than in the past, more games are created today leading to even more games dying and fading away. Newer successful games will be remastered and rebooted for as long as there is a business case for it.
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    I once read a book "proving" the Bible was divinely written because it had survived so long. No other text had survived so long! Aside from being flatly incorrect, it was a textbook survivorship bias just like this. This article could be an SAT question prompt.
• dismalaf 1y ago
  It's literally survivorship bias. There were tons of shitty old games. The ones we remember are the good ones. And AAA publishers don't want to admit it, but gameplay trumps graphics. If I want to see something that looks like real life, I go outside.
• dragonwriter 1y ago
  Survivorship bias: if an old game is still around now, it is far out on the resistant-to-dying tail of games of its era. Lots of old games died.
• petee 1y ago
  I played Oregon Trail last night on archive.org -- what a great resource ~6000 on Farmer :)
• TacticalCoder 1y ago
  [dead]
• nagaiaida 1y ago
  > Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore. https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-dragon-of-the-past/ https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-d... yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming
• smeeger 1y ago
  old games will die as soon as all the millennials die. its so weird how much millennials love to read historical accounts of things that they already know. 90% of HN knows what it was like to play CS 1.6… but this article relates that information as if it were ancient knowledge being unearthed for the first time in centuries. seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
  There are way better games now than before what is the article even talking about. Are they looking only at AAA and multiplayer games? There are a gazillion indie masterpieces out there, go play! Game design has improved dramatically in the last 20 years, enjoy that.
• whatevaa 1y ago
  Games are not food. We can live without them. AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued. Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time. Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before making a generalized comment about everything.
• atlgator 1y ago
  Does it have anything to do with barriers to entry for modern games? Just about any modern PC can play Crysis, but you'll need some new hardware to play GTA6 when it comes out.