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> "gaming is dead now" One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of

> "gaming is dead now" One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games. In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions: - The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games - AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games - There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.

Forgeties79 2mo ago
Hell with emulation the sky is the limit now too. I’d be bummed if my steam account exploded today but I’ve got countless other options available to me. Whenever I hear people act all snobby and claim there’s nothing to play today i tell them stop playing modern games and go play all the old games that are allegedly so much better and perfect. How they can’t find anything among modern Indies in particular is beyond me, but hey, emulation’s right there waiting for them. Hell I have RetroArch on my iPhone. I was playing a PSP game all last week on mine.
officeplant 2mo ago
it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now" All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm. Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films. My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.
- LarsDu88 2mo ago
  This is a very rose tinted take. AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s. Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
  - officeplant 2mo ago
    >Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team. Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership. > AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s. Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    But they released the game and the game was good. Unlike today.
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      There were plenty of bad games back then, and worse, you only had the cover to guess what the game was all about, if you were lucky maybe some computer magazines with a proper review, and if even more lucky maybe a demo on a cover tape/floppy/CD. Today you have dozens of influencers doing play through, videos of complete games, everyone and their dog writing blog posts. You would go out, give you hard earned money as kid, regardless of pirated or original copy, and then get a garbage game with no money back.
- zuzululu 2mo ago
  Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on. That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market. A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.
ColdStream 2mo ago
My take is a bit reductionist but I have found that there is this huge divide nowadays between the AAA top of the town and the indie games at the bottom. AAA you know what you are getting, big brash but usually really polished cutting edge stuff but also designed by commitment. Then you have indie games that are high ambition but also very limited in what they can achieve. So you get a lot of things with brilliant ideas but dont always stick the landing. Two recent ones I have been going through are Skate story and Gecko gods. Both have wonder ambition but you keep hitting those issues when you realise, yeah it is an indie title. There is a middle ground but it is so hard to find in between those two extremes.
inigyou 2mo ago
Maybe that's why it's dead. Do you know what triggered the first video game crash? It was a flood of so low quality games that people gave up on the whole video gaming industry. No one wanted a game or a console until Nintendo rescued the industry with the NES lockout chip enforcing their quality control.
pjmlp 2mo ago
As oldie, I only watch some console podcasts for drama entertainment. As you pretty well point out, gaming in general is doing great, it is only the gaming version of movie blockbusters that is going down the drain. They take years to make, there is a limited budget in time, money and amount of gamers for all of them, which naturally due to the laws of physics cannot make all of them a success. AAA gaming is not like going to the movies that one invests at most 2h and it is done, up to the next thing. I also find kind of ridiculous the whole memes around PC gaming, it never went away, that is where many of us have been playing the the 8 bit home computers. I can naturally understand where they came from, most likely having grown with consoles and never been close to computers for gaming as a child, like we were in the 1980-90's.

Forgeties79 2mo ago

Hell with emulation the sky is the limit now too. I’d be bummed if my steam account exploded today but I’ve got countless other options available to me. Whenever I hear people act all snobby and claim there’s nothing to play today i tell them stop playing modern games and go play all the old games that are allegedly so much better and perfect. How they can’t find anything among modern Indies in particular is beyond me, but hey, emulation’s right there waiting for them. Hell I have RetroArch on my iPhone. I was playing a PSP game all last week on mine.

officeplant 2mo ago

it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now" All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm. Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films. My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.

LarsDu88 2mo ago
This is a very rose tinted take. AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s. Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
- officeplant 2mo ago
  >Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team. Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership. > AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s. Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  But they released the game and the game was good. Unlike today.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    There were plenty of bad games back then, and worse, you only had the cover to guess what the game was all about, if you were lucky maybe some computer magazines with a proper review, and if even more lucky maybe a demo on a cover tape/floppy/CD. Today you have dozens of influencers doing play through, videos of complete games, everyone and their dog writing blog posts. You would go out, give you hard earned money as kid, regardless of pirated or original copy, and then get a garbage game with no money back.
zuzululu 2mo ago
Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on. That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market. A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.

ColdStream 2mo ago

My take is a bit reductionist but I have found that there is this huge divide nowadays between the AAA top of the town and the indie games at the bottom. AAA you know what you are getting, big brash but usually really polished cutting edge stuff but also designed by commitment. Then you have indie games that are high ambition but also very limited in what they can achieve. So you get a lot of things with brilliant ideas but dont always stick the landing. Two recent ones I have been going through are Skate story and Gecko gods. Both have wonder ambition but you keep hitting those issues when you realise, yeah it is an indie title. There is a middle ground but it is so hard to find in between those two extremes.

inigyou 2mo ago

Maybe that's why it's dead. Do you know what triggered the first video game crash? It was a flood of so low quality games that people gave up on the whole video gaming industry. No one wanted a game or a console until Nintendo rescued the industry with the NES lockout chip enforcing their quality control.

pjmlp 2mo ago

As oldie, I only watch some console podcasts for drama entertainment. As you pretty well point out, gaming in general is doing great, it is only the gaming version of movie blockbusters that is going down the drain. They take years to make, there is a limited budget in time, money and amount of gamers for all of them, which naturally due to the laws of physics cannot make all of them a success. AAA gaming is not like going to the movies that one invests at most 2h and it is done, up to the next thing. I also find kind of ridiculous the whole memes around PC gaming, it never went away, that is where many of us have been playing the the 8 bit home computers. I can naturally understand where they came from, most likely having grown with consoles and never been close to computers for gaming as a child, like we were in the 1980-90's.