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 FortniteThat is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
I don’t get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
The game may be old but that doesn’t mean a particular person has played it before.
People don’t get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
I read every one of those and thought. Well that’s a new game. Apparently I’m old.
The amount of times I “finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I’ve been putting off” and it’s 7 years old. My kid is into “newer Disney stories” I don’t know from my day… that are 25 year old films!
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.
League of legends is two decades old now, so if you’re thinking it’s new, yeah that’s on you 😜
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.
Crazy how?
So looking it up my guess is I played AoE over Warcraft, never understood DOTA, don’t really like battle area games, and have only ever watched AoE in e-Sports.
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.
Nope. I know about DOTA and how it has a bunch of spin offs. One of my best friends plays some weird betting game that is a mod of DOTA and he tried to explain the whole thing to me a long time 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
Sounds very valve-ish. But my knowledge ends at Basshunter 😅
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.
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
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.
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.
My personal hypothesis is that everyone likes online multiplayer initially because it’s pretty cool, then you get bored it when you realise playing with angry randos is no fun. It’s not that a younger generation prefers online multiplayer, it’s that they haven’t got sick of it yet!
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.
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.
Soo… What I’m getting is that you kinda like a game called Catapult: Streets Ahead?
Free means you can easily get any friends to dip in and play which is a big factor.
Hmm. That’s a thought. I guess that that’d mesh with them also all being multiplayer.
Also big up for Cataclysm: DDA. One of the greatest games ever made.
It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it’s very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.
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!
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!
Free means a hell of a lot when you are a child with approximately $0 in expendable income.
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.
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)_/¯.
Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)
CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had “early access” packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.
Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p
Factorio considered older?
DLC is new…
So much more room to grow in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE
I mean, Factorio’s early access is the middle point between now and when God of War 2 was released. Meaning that when Factorio was on early access God of War 2 was as old then as Factorio is now.
Probably? I have memories from over a decade back so
The article puts the cutoff for “old” as being 6 years or more. Officially, Factorio was released in 2020, but we all know that any other studio would have considered it done years before that.
True in my case. All of my favorites either were released before 2020 or originally released before 2020 and I’m playing the re-release.
Only new IP I got excited about after 2020 was Project G.G. and I strongly doubt it’ll ever see the light at this point.
New games are steaming piles of shit most of the time nowadays.
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It’s just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
Yeah that’s a good point. As a kid I felt like when I bought a game it’d at least be complete, but there were plenty of terrible games back then too.
Yeah, I’ll grant the completeness point. Internet access everywhere has kind of lessened what it means to “release”.
Either oldish titles or Indies, mainstream game devs are pure malaria
I’m playing a new old game, because i’m playing the Suikoden Remaster. There for I have beaten the system by simultaniously playing both an 20+ year old game and a brand new game thats a few weeks old.
I got a steam deck on the way and I’m so stoked to use it for Suikoden. I hope they remaster number three!
The Steam Deck is actually wonderful for retro games. EmuDeck makes setting up emulators a breeze, and the roms can easily be
found onlinelegitimately ripped from your own copies of the game and loaded onto a MicroSD card.Suikoden 3 needs far, far more than just a remaster.
It needs a full blown remake, both of the story, and the game, to get rid of that trinity sight mechanic. cause the constant shifting perspectives absolutely kept me out of the game, cause every time I start to get invested boom rip me out of it and make me control someone else for a long period. I understand what they were trying to do, but it was one of the most fundamentally bad game design choices i’ve ever seen.
Suikoden 4 has a similar problem. They would need to remake that, too… and create a ton of new story and side content… because S4 is like a 7 hour game, that only takes 40 hours to play because of the absolutely ludicrously insane encounter rate… which is very blatantly used to pad game length time.
Suikoden 5, Hell… I dont even need a remaster. Just wrap the PS2 version in an emulator and release it on PC and I’ll be happy as can be.
Older games = more than 2 years old? Then the same goes for readers, movie and TV watchers, etc media consumption most isn’t from the current or previous years
Because we have a giant backlog of steam sales.
There is just so much time in a day and I think nostalgia does come to play with this as well. Gaming tends to correlate to being younger and having more free time, so by playing the same games you did back then you’re reliving those days.
Just a thought anyway, I tend to play older games as well, but also newer games like Baldur’s gate 3 or Path of Exile 2.
Does “older games” only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft… all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it’s a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn’t paint a clear picture or tell any story except “live service games work”
Built a new killer rig last summer. Have spent 90% of my time with it playing HL1 mods.
Recently upgraded to a 7800x3D, 64GB DDR5, and a 4070… which I’ve been using to get back into modded Minecraft recently.
Same machine… The framerates I’m getting in Rimworld are off the charts.
Tbf, the larger modpacks can be pretty resource intensive.
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.
I have hundreds of games on steam.
I mostly play minecraft.
Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.
I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I’ll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft… Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won’t touch minecraft.
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I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
Have you looked at mods? I’m sure I saw an auomation mod for Terraria a while back.
Same might be true for starbound. But I don’t know much about its mods.
This 100%. I looooove Noita and any deep systems-driven games where players explore, discover, and create content for years.
One of my favourite things is the sudden discovery that a game is much bigger and more open-ended than I thought. Especially when it happens dozens of hours in.
I’ve been playing a lot of terraria with my son recently, it’s been a lot of fun going back to it. Coincidentally, I just saw the trailer for Noita for the first time last night, and thought “woah, that looks cool as hell…”
I die too fast in Noita to get too deep into it… I liked what I played of it though. Something about Starbound made it feel like Temu Terraria… I can’t put my finger on why it feels so … fake? Like physics or the way the player model moves and interacts with blocks is off or something. Maybe it is just too close to Terraria and the many hours I spent in Terraria makes anything close feel off.
My games library is so huge, and I suffer from choice paralysis all the time.
You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I’ve used it before when I can’t pick what to play. You can apply filters too.
⭐w⭐ Thanks!
Most new AAA games suck, that’s why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
Now they’re made with marketable ‘passion’, ‘dedication’, and a team with ‘a family atmosphere’. My personal favorite ‘respect for the lore and previous games in the series’ definitely never has made a triple A game worse for wear.
Disingenuous buzzwords with no objective meaning behind them are my favorite things to hear in a game. It tells me to steer clear as far away as I possibly can. Which is a shame because I’d like to be excited about vampire: the masquerade 2.
Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.
The industry is deeply misguided.
It feels like it’s always been this way. The amount of ‘doom clones’ from the way back times are not to be forgotten.
It has, and its not just games though. Clothes, cars, movies, anime, even food all have trends. There are those that innovate, and those that imitate.
There are good new games, but i cannot afford to pay for them. Especially when I blow through them in a couple of weeks/days.
Which is why I pirate them as a lot of new games lack quality content, are often buggy, and riddled with dlc/micro transactions. Why risk my money on a buggy undeveloped game when I can ‘test’ them for free, at times I have gone back and paid for a game I really enjoyed… but that is super rare.
Plus GPUs are overpriced, especially with AI taking over as it is, the price is just going to go up.
Why bother with all of that when I can just boot up Factorio again. Additionally mods really make old games feel fresh again… And they are free.
My principle is “One euro, for one hour”.
Does the game cost 40e? Am I unsure whether I’d enjoy the game for 40 hours? I’ll get it for free first. Does it stick for that 40 hours or more, or will I get sure enough while playing to play that 40 hours at least? OK, take my money. No? It gets forgotten in my folder, and probably deleted later.