PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now - eviltoast
  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

    I can wait till a game is $5. I’ve got so many to enjoy already.

    Darktide, you’re worth $5. Admit it. Release a dlc pack with new maps gamemodes characters classes whatever if you want more money. But the base game is worth $5.

    I wanna shoot the heavy bolter at shit. The sounds for the gun sound so satisfyingly chunky. Slap that hunk of metal in the emperor’s name. Hell yeah

    See you in 2-3 years

  • RadimentriX@troet.cafe
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    2 hours ago

    @tonytins 6 years is old now? :< couldnt care less about the competitive/pvp stuff but im playing x4 foundations most of the time currently and some genres dont get that many new entries anyway, like open world action games like gta5. Thats from 2013 and most other titles like mafia 3 or just cause 4 arent much newer either

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOP
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      1 hour ago

      I hear ya’. Technology (including games) progressed so rapidly that I feel older than I honestly should.

  • MysticKetchup@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    People are reading the headline and assuming they’re talking about older single-purchase games, but the article is actually referring to mostly MTX-driven games that get continuous updates.

    And the data further shows, in Newzoo’s own words, that these 908 million “PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games.”

    Remember that even things like Rocket League are about a decade old at this point, and games like LoL, Dota 2 and CS:GO are even older

  • arotrios@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They’re too expensive, often don’t run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don’t have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.

    On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.

    Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won’t enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?

    It’s why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I’m going to buy a title.

    • Guy Fleegman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      New AAA games suck.

      I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.

      • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 hours ago

        I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 hours ago

      For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.

    • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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      8 hours ago

      I don’t know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)

      A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it’s hard to make good games period. I’m not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.

    • jnod4@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol

      • cod@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        !newcommunities@lemmy.world is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there

        Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      8 hours ago

      Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.

      • afronaut@slrpnk.net
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        8 hours ago

        Yes, actually that was my intended next run! I just gotta remember how to set up everything.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    9 hours ago

    I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like “games are a waste of time”. But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.

    Also I’ve been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it’s still fun

    • afronaut@slrpnk.net
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      9 hours ago

      I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.

  • M137@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    When people found out PhysX doesn’t work on the new Nvidia cards I saw several people here on Lemmy say that it doesn’t matter because almost no one plays older games. I seriously don’t understand how anyone could think that, it’s astoundingly stupid and ignorant.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    13 hours ago

    7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
    6.4% were in League of Legends
    6.2% were in Roblox
    5.8% were in Dota 2
    5.4% were in Fortnite

    That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.

    • GoumLeChat@jlai.lu
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      13 hours ago

      Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don’t have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        12 hours ago

        I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”

        I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.

        But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.

        You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.

        If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.

          • tal@lemmy.today
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            13 hours ago

            Hmm. That’s a thought. I guess that that’d mesh with them also all being multiplayer.

              • tal@lemmy.today
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                12 hours ago

                It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it’s very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.

                • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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                  12 hours ago

                  That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!

        • tetrachromacy@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It’s rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that’s 9 cents an hour, and I’m still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!

        • GoumLeChat@jlai.lu
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          12 hours ago

          I’m old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.

          But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.

          • logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 hours ago

            3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you’ve pretty much got it figured out.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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      9 hours ago

      besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.

    • kionay@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      I’m playing Counter-Strike 2

      … exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod

      … that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago

        • LacklusterGamer@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          I’m going to be honest I just looked up the game for the first time and had no clue it came out in 2009. I hadn’t ever heard of it until a few years ago so I just figured it was some new game. The whole warcraft/dota thing was crazy to me.

            • tacofox@lemm.ee
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              2 hours ago

              I just learned that DOTA was a wc3 mod originally like last month, so I’m assuming that’s what they mean?

              Edit: and how did I find out? Well, Basshunter’s “DOTA” music video of course. Which coincidentally I also learned was about DOTA the game lol.

              • RadimentriX@troet.cafe
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                2 hours ago

                @tacofox @AwesomeLowlander wasnt LoL made by some of the original DotA modders? But somehow valve ended up with the rights for the name so they made DotA 2 as a standalone game? It’s been ages since iv’e seen an article about the origins of those games :D

                • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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                  12 minutes ago

                  There were many people who worked on dota back then. There was no official version to begin with, you could find a dozen variants in bnet on any given day. Slowly it got centralised. Some of the modders ended up at LoL, others ended up at Valve. The name wasn’t copyrighted, nobody really owned it. Valve kinda inherited it by virtue of hiring the guy running the mod team at the end.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        11 hours ago

        Apparently I’m old.

        Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:

        https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/

        These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.

        Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.

  • Nino477@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.

    • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games…

      This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.

      AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      11 hours ago

      !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.

      But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:

      • Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.

      • There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.

      • The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.

      • If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.

      There are some downsides, though:

      • With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.

      • The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.

      • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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        10 hours ago

        Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.

        And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.

        There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it’s not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen

        • Level9831@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Black ops 6 is so bad IMHO. It takes forever to boot up the game and then hits you with the “update available, quit & restart”. Then waiting another 5 mins to download the update, then another couple mins to reach the main menu again. Oh and what was the actual update? To hit me with an advertisement video of season whatever…with new purchases for dumb costumes etc. Like c’mon just let me play the damn game already! When Im finally in a match the gameplay feels rigged…like I’m playing slots in Vegas than an actual video game. The respawns appearing out of nowhere. I honestly believe what I’m seeing on my screen is not what the other player is seeing. Its like these game designers purposely made this game based on an algorithm rather than setting game rules and allowing the players to compete based on skill. Maybe I’m way off on this (and am just a terrible cod player lol) but would like to hear other people’s opinion on this.

          all the advertisements, constantly wanting me to spend more money when the game was already expensive to begin with. The game play as described as above. Also the perks/tiers suck. Makes for a very unenjoyable experience. The game is just not fun.

          • Nelots@lemm.ee
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            7 hours ago

            I will say, the zombies mode is the best version in many years. For the low price of $0 through gamepass (which I get for free through an MS Rewards farming script), I can’t complain too much about it. But I wish they would just release a standalone zombies game at some point, it’s literally the only thing I like about cod and would gladly actually buy it (assuming it isn’t ass, which is like 50/50 with cod lol).

          • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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            7 hours ago

            We’re at Black Ops 6 already? They made 6 of them? Are there other Call of Duty games as well since? I think the last I played was Infinite Warfare, I think I have WWII in my library unplayed.

            I kinda lost track of the AAA treadmill.

          • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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            7 hours ago

            I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.