8 ms·

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 g

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

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
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- 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.
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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