Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases (pcgamer.com) 120
Steam users spent only 15% of their total gaming time on new releases in 2024, according to the platform's year-end review, an increase from 9% in 2023 but below 2022's 17%.
Legacy titles dominated playtime, with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.
Legacy titles dominated playtime, with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.
No no no (Score:2, Insightful)
If the industry starts paying attention to this, they are absolutely going to start leaning on valve to discourage playing older games and something is going to become a lot more annoying.
Re:No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
I haven't personally been a gamer in a very long time, but it was my experience that for multiplayer games, a new game had to really offer something novel to justify players shifting from their then-current favorites over to the new game.
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Starcraft is still fun for me, thats like 1998, so yea. I see you can get all the old Tex Murphy games for $5 for the bundle
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I agree that most modern AAA games are garbage, but there are still a lot of great new indie games being released. Hell, "boomer shooters" has become an entire genre to separate newly-created old-school shooters from the AAA slop. With so many games being released, I'm perfectly happy to buy them discounted and play them years after release, the games are just as fun. I've had a rule that I'll only buy a game if it's under $10 until I've played through all of my queue, I feel like I've been doing this for a
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I get some new games. But I don't always play them immediately. I get them if on sale, or I'm pretty sure they're good, but that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on them immediately. This isn't a console subscription service for kids where everyone plays whatever offered game is there that month, or whatever the latest fashion is amongst their friends. Steam gamers are not the same as XBox or PlayStation gamers. That shouldn't surprise people, but apparently some game companies haven't figured that out.
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I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
Same place it's always been, virtually nowhere.
People play older games for the same reasons they rewatch old movies and old music.
Sure new tech gives new game and film makers some advantages (not so much with music). But most stuff is derivative and crappy.
So gamers mostly play old hits that are still super playable. Add to that steep sales on older games, and new releases don't get a ton of playtime.
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I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
This... And I have a suitcase full of older games that still run on modern OS's that don't have anything to do with Steam (not to mention GOG purchases).
There are two reasons why people aren't playing new releases as much...
Number 1. is as you've stated, a lot of new games are crap. Platform decay (enshitification) has seen the quality of new releases decline in both gameplay and story. Design by committee means everything is as safe and mass market as possible. Absolutely no risk taken in case some poo
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"Older games" certainly includes various well loved singleplayer titles or 'classic' multiplayer ones that don't kick back to the mothership anymore; but it also includes 'live service' and not-technically-live-service-but-look-at-all-those-skins-and-battle-passes titles that happen to have original release dates from some time ago.
Something like DO
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Valve literally runs the likes of Counter Strike. "Leaning on Valve" over this would be laughable.
This before the fact that biggest games off steam are also older. Fortnite, LoL, WoW etc.
Re: No no no (Score:2)
As the 800lb gorilla, Valve DGAF. They have been instituting consumer friendly labeling requirements regarding DRM and such and there is no exodus.
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Yeah, but also as the 800 pound gorilla its in their interest to keep selling more games, yeah?
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I think this is why streaming services will stop offering older titles a lot of the time.
That said, examining my recent games:
2015, 2009, 2007, 2022, 2021, 2017
Zero 2024 releases, 3 older than 8 years, 3 between 2 and 7 years.
I can get older games for a lot less money, there's a huge catalog that I can pick through for actually fun games, bugs have probably been addressed (though start reappearing if old enough), and there's less stuff like microtransactions or requirements to be "always online".
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New games have gotten worse (Score:3)
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This is why we need to legalize piracy of delisted games
I agree that we need to revise copyright law to address the problem of abandoned works, but is it really piracy if copying is legal?
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Yaaaar!
Ima pirate, but a legal one, so I'll only file an injunction for public release.
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The CPUs and GPUs did not get that much better, as they have in the past.
The jump to 4K was a bit much (but it had to happen, 4K displays are very affordable).
The people in charge don't seem to be nerds anymore. It seems to be business and arts majors running things more now. But this really is geek culture. And if artsy people take charge, I expect better writing, better NPC modeling, world building etc. These have not seen significant improvements and in some studios famed for these, it seems to have gott
Re:New games have gotten worse (Score:4, Informative)
The actual problem is the opposite. GPUs and CPUs are massively better. Engines are way better. Tools are way better.
But time of graphics developer got hilariously expensive (and bloat is mostly in the DEI side, such as writing, where a lot of money was injected in the wake of woke takeover of much of industry).
As a result, developers are now urged to take a lot of shortcuts in graphics, and then put some form of temporal anti-aliasing to hide the presence of said shortcuts. Just take TAA off in a lot of modern games, and you'll see a lot of crap. Jittering, poor texture and geometry quality, things like vegetation and hair being done in a hilariously bad manner, etc.
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They are massively better if you discount the fact that they are now sold in much higher segments, RTX 4090 is a 450W TDP GPU and RTX 5090 is rumored to be a 600W TDP GPU. RTX 5090 is expected to be $2000 - $2500. At the conventional segments, they have improved much slowly.
At the same price point and TDP, there has been only about a 220% improvement over the last 8 years in the segment that I buy (mid-range). That is very low when compared to increments from the previous 8 years.
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TDP is borderline irrelevant for a gamer, beyond "what kind of a case and PSU do I buy for this". We're not talking about some data center where this is actually of high relevance.
As for price, we got fucked by ethereum PoW boom, followed by AI boom. Things unrelated to gaming, but that share the market for GPU silicon with it.
Performance is way better.
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I disagree. TDP is relevant everywhere except maybe in US.
Price is relevant everywhere.
Performance per watt is the real metric. It increased 3x in the last 8 years. It was growing at 6x in the 8 years prior. That's not optimistic and its going to get worse. Frame Generation is masking the lack of past rate of progress.
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I'm not in US. TDP is irrelevant to me. It's equally irrelevant to basically everyone I know. It's just not a relevant metric when you buy a PC, for any component for gaming, beyond selection of appropriate PSU and case.
Almost no one I know uses fake frames stuff. Upscalers are used mostly for people with higher resolution monitors and who want to use RT that doesn't look horrible without crippling framerates.
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I do use 4K monitors. They are the inexpensive and can be considered baseline for desktop use. It's painful to read documents and code in 1080p once you get used to 4K.
My point isn't about whether current cards can run current games. The developers will try to make games that a sizable hardware pool can run. As a consequence of hardware not getting much better, we have 10 year old games that look competitive with current gen games. This never happened before. Can you imagine 1990 games that looked good next
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Good for you. That makes you....
Checks steam hardware survey...
About 4% of gamers. As opposed to gaming mainstream that is still on 1080p (well over half) with about a fifth of remaining ones on 1440p.
To quote a certain game dev, "if you have a (rare resolution, GPU, etc), congratulations. No one cares about you. You may as well not exist for optimization purposes".
P.S. This before the fact that older games you claim to be playing at 4k have utterly atrocious interface scaling support for 4k, making them bo
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To correct my previous post, it's about a fifth of total, not remaining ones for 1440p.
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I have a mainstream GPU and display.
My mid-range GPU is exactly what devs target. I don't have a game optimization complaint. That was your complaint (DEI, woke etc, because you play newer titles). My GPU has the same performance as the most common GPU for November in the survey.
You were talking of: Gamers don't care about TDP etc.
That would be the RTX 4090 class, which is at 1% of gamers by steam hardware survey. So that quote actually applies to you.
Most gamers don't run at 4K, because they can't run new
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>I have a mainstream GPU and display.
I have literally demonstrated with statistics that you're the opposite of that. A massive outlier.
Who continues to insist that his rare and very strange demands for the system are shared by almost no one.
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Continuing from previous post ...that are shared by almost no one, are actually mainstream. Somehow.
Nothing about your setup or how you run it is mainstream. You are an outlier among outliers. Someone who runs old games at 4k resolution. And who's so utterly captured in this magical projection, that you think I run a xx90 card.
I am very much average. I run a 1080p display on a xx60 class card right now. I used to run same resolution on an xx70 card before. I have a mid range CPU.
Do you know what I don't giv
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I would get listed as normal spec in the Steam Survey. My laptop is a FHD display with xx60. I also happen to have a 4K display attached to it when gaming. So the stats you refer to have quite a bit of caveats.
> And who's so utterly captured in this magical projection, that you think I run a xx90 card.
Well, it was you who was nonplussed about 450-600W cards.
I am just amused you think this is normal. The cards becoming ridiculously big and expensive is something that is joked about, not something I made u
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> You are an outlier among outliers. Someone who runs old games at 4k resolution.
You say this literally on an article that says 85% are running older games, while pointing to stats that suggest that my GPU performance is median and that the most common multi-monitor resolution is 3840 x 1080
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Two side by side 1080p monitors are not 4k. Did you not know this?
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I'll just leave you with one last data point. AMD actually tried pushing your narrative that "TDP matters to gamers" recently with current gen ryzen 9xxx non-X3D CPUs.
You could get about +3% performance for about half TDP of the 7xxx gen of the same performance tier. Amazing deal if people care about TDP. Almost no one bought them. Release was an absolute dumpster fire. AMD ended up adding high power mode to 9xxx motherboard support microcode in an update, allowing you to basically blast it with almost doub
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I know. 2x FHD was what I did with GTX 260. The needle has not moved since 2008.
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Then how is this relevant to your point on TDP and gaming at 4k?
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The same point I have been making all along. Gaming has consistently seen resolution improvements over the years without increasing TDP. It is no longer the case. If you want good frame rates, you have stick to display resolutions that are almost 2 decades old. This is what you are doing, sticking to old display technology. This is what most people have resigned themselves to. FHD is what I expect a non-expensive phone to have at the minimum today, on a 5" screen... and that is what PC gaming has been stuck
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Resolutions are the same because we're effectively in the sweet spot. Most people play at specific distance from their monitors, meaning these monitors are of specific size. And at that distance and size, there are specific resolutions up to which you see significant graphics improvements, and after which you don't.
For PC gaming, that is somewhere between 1080 and 1440 for most people. I could get a 4k display tomorrow. I have exactly zero desire to do so, because distance I'm gaming at and monitor size I'm
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I can't stand FHD text anymore, at desktop screen sizes. FHD is OK for video and gaming. But now that I do have 4K, I want to use it. And I can say that the leap from FHD to 4K is as good as the leap from HD to FHD. But FHD gaming does not look good on my 4K display (looks fine on a 16" laptop screen). I have a 40" 4K TV. I sit close to it. My eye sight is not great either, but at this size, I can clearly see the difference.
1440 is more appropriate for my GPU, but again, I have a 4K display that I appreciat
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The only good thing about 4k display is that you can in fact use it for native 1080 gaming, It's 2:1 scale vertically and horizontally. No artefacts from non-native resolution.
But you lose color accuracy and refresh rate for the same price. So awful trade-off. And if your screen is properly sized, font scaling should be fine at distance. As evidenced by basically no one using those screens.
Again, it's ok to have unique wants and needs. What's not ok is trying to push those unique wants and needs on overwhel
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Who is "pushing"? The problem is that they are not pushing. If you had a GTX 1060, you would be fine now at 1080p for 99% of the games. There is no push.
Passmark
GTX 960 mobile - 3,375
GTX 1060 mobile - 8,161
RTX 4060 mobile - 17,623
It took 8 years to double, that used to take 1.5 years in the past. Now it takes 3-4 generations to get what used to take 1 generation.
1080p is not so much as a sweet spot, it's coping.
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It very much is a sweet spot, and we're seeing the same thing with 4k and televisions, for exact same reason. Distance from screen + screen size = optimal resolution for overwhelming majority of people.
1440 screens for example came on the back of proliferation of 27" and above desktop screens more than anything else.
P.S. Let's not even talk about specific cards because between "the two 1060s with 3 vs 6 gigs of ram" that were two completely different cards, 2060 being actually a 70 grade card (as 60 grade c
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Regardless, when making a comparison, one needs to take some standards to compare quantitatively. They are expected to smoothen out across generations, even if the numbering is not fully consistent between every generation. Price, TDP etc need to be adjusted for to measure progress in technology. Selling a twice as expensive GPU with twice as much TDP is only somewhat better than doing SLI, not actual progress. Performance per watt/dollar is a reasonable measure of progress. Progress there has been slow.
You
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There have been people who have "seen the beginning of end of Moore's law" since 1990s.
It's 2024 and it's still ongoing. I grant people who make this prediction same kind of credence as I give those economists who predicted 5000 of the last two recessions.
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That's because it was inevitable and it's already here.
https://cap.csail.mit.edu/deat... [mit.edu]
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Yeah, we get that story every year at least since 2000. These people have predicted Moore's Law ending at least 200 time in my lifetime, probably more. It still keeps going.
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It's already dead. They are not doubling in performance every 18 months.
Wikipedia:
In 1975, House noted that Moore's revised law of doubling transistor count every 2 years in turn implied that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months, with no increase in power consumption
Selling bigger, pricier, more power hungry chips that don't double in performance in 2 years is not Moore's law.
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And we're back on the point that no one in gamer circles cares about TDP.
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No one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgam... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/expla... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/realA... [reddit.com]
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The obvious point being "no normal people", as our entire discussion was in fact to show that there are edge cases such as yourself that care about things that mainstream doesn't.
Do I need to write this preface to every single post in spite of us having been talking about this specific point?
P.S. In before the obvious joke of "I was talking about humans. Not redditors".
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OK, how would I demonstrate to you that "humans" care? What sources am I permitted to quote, if you disqualify forums where people talk about these things?
2022: https://www.tomshardware.com/n... [tomshardware.com]
2023: https://www.tweaktown.com/news... [tweaktown.com]
2024: https://www.tomshardware.com/p... [tomshardware.com]
There isn't any value in an upgrade any more.
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But time of graphics developer got hilariously expensive (and bloat is mostly in the DEI side, such as writing, where a lot of money was injected in the wake of woke takeover of much of industry).
I can just imagine Luckyo driving:
Another flat?!?! Damn these woke tires and DEI roads!!!
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I'm sure the likes of Concord and Dragon Age Veilguard will start selling to Wider Audience any moment now.
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The CPUs and GPUs did get better. Okay perhaps not the doubling in single core speeds we had in the 90s, but as someone who recently replaced a 9 year old machine that was top end at the time, shit's fast now, yo. What happened though was that the graphics programming all but went away and now every game is using software generated shaders from gui tools driven by artists who will just keep layering effects until they get the look they want to be stuck on models cranked out by asset farms who don't care a j
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Yes, the software has gotten worse, but so has hardware. The rate of hardware performance increases have fallen to half the previous rate. Vendors have only compensated by doubling both TDP and price, especially in case of GPUs.
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And yes, upgrading after 9-10 years is obviously going to show major performance improvement, but you used to see that difference in 5 years previously.
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[waves hand]
Dropped outta art school to run super computers but wtf do I know?
Re:New games have gotten worse (Score:4, Interesting)
This ^^, fire up GRID AutoSport, Fallout 3, or BioShock Infinite, set the resolution to 1080p and crank all the other video settings to full - You can this with very modest hardware now. None of those titles will look "dated" run that way. For the most part the game play isnt far removed if at all from current titles either.
We have not had a generational leap forward in capability, since about the xbox360 era really. DLSS might be more than just fancy up-scaling but from what I have seen if you are playing on ~25in display, with keyboard, mouse, and perhaps flight yoke or steering wheel at desk I am just not convinced the experience of going beyond 1080p means much unless you in the super competitive space, for the guy who just wants to kill a couple hours blasting zombies it just does not offer much new.
Until the industry can convince everyone they *want* to play in VR or the hardware can really deliver on fully raytraced environments and super-HD resolution with good frame rates for a truly "photo real" experience the industry is going to have to get used to competing with their own previous titles.
That is a newer experience for them. In the past the technology shifts have pretty much meant that new games always compared pretty favorable to older titles (shovelware excluded). 1987-90's EGA/VGA titles were a great leap over the CGA stuff we mostly had before that. 1993's games were big jump over 1990's etc because machines had enough memory to do more interesting stuff. 1997/8 openGL titles were big leap over 1995s fake 3d sectorized stuff + sprites.
I don't feel we have seen anything quite so dramatic in the last decade. So game from 2014 is going to be just as interesting to someone who hasnt played it before as a newer title.
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The way I see it games have only improved on graphics and became relatively worse on gameplay, plot, enemy AI.
What good are shiny visuals when the game is repetitive or the enemy is so predictable it's like shooting fish in a barrel?
For instance, I like the large space of Far Cry 5, but prefer Far Cry 2 where the opponents at least hide when they realise they're being sniped. And the graphics are just fine.
Or Borderlands 2 which I'm exploring now has good ideas, but suffers also from predictable AI and some
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gameplay matters too. I'll admit I still enjoy Starcraft and dont mind its older nature. I mean Starcraft goes back to the days where LAN parties were IPX based and to get around the blizzard servers you could use the Kali software to emulate IPX over tcp/ip. 1998? sounds about right. Cyberpunk was OK once they fixed the bugs, it had storyline and quests galore. It got a bit too easy when I could jack into the camera system and remote overload someones cybernetics and kill them from outside the building. I
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We've been promised 4K and 8K gaming for years now, yet devs have admitted to being lazy and over rely on DLSS and related technologies and still think 30FPS is acceptable.
The GPU cards can't keep up. Not surprising given CPUs hit their thermal limits on raw single core performance well over a decade ago. There's also the need to have a level playing field for competitive games. (Faster frame generation means more time for input grabbing and network responses. Keeping the framerate low helps ensure a minimum system response time for all players.)
games haven't really improved in graphics
They aren't going to. The displays we have now output more pixels than a human eye is capable of recognizing, and the studios have
Gameplay not Graphics (Score:2)
Despite having much more powerful CPUs and GPUs, games haven't really improved in graphics.
I think that nicely sums up the problem with recent games: they all focus on "wow" graphics because that's a lot easier to achieve that coming up with innovative and fun gameplay combined with a computer opponent who is not easily defeated after a couple of games or who is not insanely hard because it cheats like crazy.
Games that use graphics as a draw have a very short shelf-life because if the only reason you play it is because it looks cool and so there is little replayability. However, make compelli
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Actual reason for this is proliferation of TAA as a crutch for shortcuts. This is why everything nowadays looks so blurry and shitty compared to games from ten years ago.
There's a dev channel that goes into details on enshittification of graphics in games.
https://www.youtube.com/@Threa... [youtube.com]
His first video on topic is just lethal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Word of warning. If you don't have a problem with the way games look now, don't watch that video. You will not be able to unsee the issue, and it will
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He started off as a game developer who was a user of said engine. And saw all the problems.
He now leads a project where they forked the engine and are trying to build a better implementation of said engine with better optimization for static environments and less retarded temporal smear.
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I think graphics still get better, but the gameplay is what isn't improving, and often is going backwards.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Hidden reason for this is because new games on Steam are usually broken as hell for the first year or so. Say what you will about Nintendo, but Valve could stand to take a page from their book on quality control.
This (Score:3)
Hidden reason for this is because new games on Steam are usually broken as hell for the first year or so. Say what you will about Nintendo, but Valve could stand to take a page from their book on quality control.
Exactly this! I see people posting all sorts of rationals for these numbers from steam but none of them match what I'm looking at. Paying good money on a broken game when I could wait 6 months and get the same game but working and likely at discount by this time is just absurd to me. Sure, I'm eager to play a new release of a game I've been waiting for but what's the point if the odds are strongly in favor of it being broken on launch?
If game studios ever want more gamers to buy their games on day one they
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GoG players are even worse (Score:5, Informative)
If you think this is bad, you don't want to look at GoG players. Many of them spend their time playing 20-30 year old games!
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And best of all those games can be played without needing to phone home to some server which might not exist after a few years.
Or need a gaming rig with the latest CPU and bloated videocard and then still crawl at times because of the crappy lazy code of the game.
I wish I had the source code and/or map editor for some games so I could fix and change things. That's what I love about Neverwinter Nights for instance, it's actually a D&D framework to build your own adventures. As well as Doom and Quake wher
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SMAC/X (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) is still in regular rotation on my game box.
"Legacy" can mean 3 months old? (Score:2)
You can't really get much information from this. If I buy a game in Jan 2024 that came out in Dec 2023, that's not "Legacy", that's brand new.
I do wait though in a lot of cases. I don't want to pay full price when I can often get it for 35-60% off within the next 12 or so months. Steam's wishlist makes that easy. Just wait until I'm notified of a sale and see if the price is right yet.
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A really great single-player game with a story can take hours and hours to play through... and have significant replay value afterwards.
But I'm still really only willing to fork over the price of a movie ticket for it, so yeah, I'm not buying ANYTHING new. Game prices are ridiculous. A little bit of patience and you end up having so much more for the same amount of money.
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Skyrim AE bundle is only $11.99!
Re: "Legacy" can mean 3 months old? (Score:2)
I am willing to pay more than a movie ticket because a movie lasts two hours but even a short game is usually at least 20 hours.
I still usually don't because I don't have to, there are cheaper games out there. Or because there is some major flaw I'm not willing to pay for.
Novelty and quality have changed (Score:2)
Home computer games were text-based. Occasionally ASCII. Then very low res monchrome, then a few colours.
Point is, games hit 'good enough' more than a few years ago, and now the engagement comes primarily from the mechanics and story. Better graphics are 'nice' but a more satisfying story with a better interface is more important.
When somebody gets that right, that game is no longer obsolete in a few years because of technological improvement. It will last until somebody makes something better, not just
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nethack is still a awesome game... yes, crap graphics, but it is a game that i return to play every few years, it is fun, hard, challenging and after the initial scare with the interface, it quiet usable ... and yes, it run just fine now as in a 486 cpu 30 years ago
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Yep, and I occasionally play NetTrek or whatever it's called. Retro fun! But most of those old games are just too clunky, slow, and frustrating for nostalgia to make them fun to play for long.
Every once in a while I load up my old Infocom games and it takes about 5-10 minutes before they go right back into storage where they belong.
Every new game has to compete with the corpus (Score:2)
"Steam saw a 70% jump in new game play time" (Score:2)
Anecdotes are not data (Score:2)
I strongly suspect Factorio ate up a bunch of the other 85%. The October re-release basically one-shotted the entire PC-using engineering world. :D
Outlier (Score:2)
[looks at his 14 hours spent on Skyrim this past week]
Buy Games With Replayability (Score:2)
Bad metric is bad (Score:2)
It takes about 70 hours to play through a new single player game, and 400 or more hours to master it to the point that you get most of the achievements, and often times significantly more than that to 100% the game. For multiplayer games they want to keep you playing as long as possible for all the various revenue-generating schemes they use, not to mention the time spent lobbies and such waiting for sessions to start. Outside of normal responsibilities, a typical person is lucky if they have 1000 hours of
Bad year for new releases (Score:2)
Old games are popular (Score:2)
Counter-strike 2 is still one of the most played games. It's ancient.
I still play Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, and Morrowind more frequently than anything else in my library. These game companies aren't going to make a lot of money off me if I'm still playing 20 year old games. I probably play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri about 5 hours every year, not the main thing I play but it's a 25 year old game that I still go back to from time to time.
Online games tend to be very long-lived as long as the servers are kept
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I wonder if CS2 counted as a 'new' game for this statistic. Since, it was released in 2024 (I think?).
It is just an in-place replacement for CS:GO, which is very old, but it is technically new.
Too expensive.and controlled. (Score:2)
A lot of games are coming out in incomplete states with the idea they'll patch them / update them later but still want a fuck ton of money. 80$ for an incomplete game, even a full game is a lot of money. Too much where they take stuff out of a complete game, call it DLC and use it as a sales bumper with crap like day one DLC or shortly after. DLC used to be 'We put everything we could into this game to make it great, and since so many people love it, we're going to get working on a project to expand it and
The price of new games surely impacts the figures? (Score:2)
I never buy new Steam games because their price is usually quite high - $50 or more for a AAA game for example. Anyone fiscally sensible and having some modicum of patience simply waits for the game to be made available far cheaper, whether that's in a Steam (or third party offerimg Steam keys) sale, it turns up in a bundle (e.g. Humble Choice, Humble Bundle or Fanatical) or ends up as a freebie on Prime Gaming, Epic Games Store, GoG or Fanatical.
While you're waiting for that one stupidly expensive AAA Stea
Trailing edge (Score:4, Insightful)
I never play new games, because I'm a cheap bastard who always waits for a sale. The game will be just as entertaining a couple years from now but at 1/3rd the price. (It helps that I only play single-player games, so it doesn't matter to me if everyone else has already moved on to the new hotness. Obviously this doesn't work if you're looking for fully-populated servers.)
Basically, I'm this guy [xkcd.com].
Re: (Score:3)
The game will be just as entertaining a couple years from now but at 1/3rd the price.
Even better you can also avoid the high-priced duds. I dodged Starfield that way...
Emulation is really good right now, even for linux (Score:2)
Add in modern stuff like fan patches with new translations, analog stick mods, bugfixes etc. on top of emulator save states, and speedup, it turns say a PS2 game into a slightly different experience with a lot less time wasted. t's hard to overstate how easy and rewarding it is now to play old games. (cough vimm cough)
On steam you can even point to a windows-only emulator exe file as an external game and run it with Proton, which will run windows-only emulators like xenia (for xbox 360). Maybe it won't be p
I have tons of old games! (Score:2)
And many of them were free from give aways! I just don't have the modern hardwares and time to play them. One day, I will!
Time is valuable (Score:2)
Time is a limited resource. With most new games being total PC-loaded, mediocre crap, no wonder players choose titles that consistently deliver quality.
nuts -- the data doesn't say what he says it does (Score:2)
As someone with a math-heavy CS degree -- albeit one dustier than the Civ II box sitting on my gaming bookshelf -- I still feel compelled to critique this article as a case study in "how not to publish" about gamer engagement.
The author takes a dataset that is, at best, limited and fails to account for glaring confounding variables. Using Steam's global playtime percentages, they leap to broad conclusions about new game popularity and engagement trends, without addressing:
The im