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%20Lin...
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.
With games, it's even worse because once the servers are gone, the whole thing can literally stop functioning. At least with movies you can still rip a Blu-ray or buy a DVD. And it's not just about making money anymore, it's about shaping consumer habits so we accept losing access as the default.
If you care about this, vote with your wallet. If you don't like a game's phone-home or planned-obsolescence "features," don't buy it (or wait for a deal and don't pay full price).
I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.
Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord
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.
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
You are proving GP and OP’s point. CS 1.6 was an exceptionally popular game in the GoldSrc days and that is why it survived and was chosen by you as an example. That is an exception not the norm. Plenty of FPSs from the same generation have been forgotten. How many people out there are still playing Day of Defeat? Or Counter Strike Condition Zero? Or any of the old Delta Force games? Or Daikatana (except for the lol factor?)
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
I think the Starseige Tribes community is still active. They have DOZENS of people, dozens!!
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
---------
The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
Bit weird to compare a singleplayer game with little replayability to the genre defining multiplayer game of its time and try drawing conclusions from that.
Doom was the genre defining multiplayer game, and it released in 1993. And there were a ton of multiplayer shooters released in the 7 years interim. The only really distinct thing about Counter-Strike, besides its quality, is that it came to Steam from the very beginning. But the game had already become a classic before 1.6 launched on Steam and the idea of playing on/through Steam at the time was quite divisive.
Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without install etc.
There's quite a few ports to the browser running around, though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
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.
Older DRM is more commonly cracked because there’s more time to crack it. Though the arms race has grown way more sophisticated from the supply side
You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube anymore.
Completely wrong.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
You can, and you can even play it with Dreamcast and PC players: https://sylverant.net/
There are private servers that you can connect to, no? I remember reading about it not that long ago!
Even all the offline content?
beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.
At that point I think the game is available as ROM file or at least the owner of rare one should make such.
MSX/C64 era: games are smaller than your average png icon
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days
The unit being a $20 CD-ROM drive? Losing the disk would be a bigger problem than damaging the drive.
If you want to ply on original hardware, which people that use original cds typically do, the drive might be valuable or hard to replace depending on the system.
It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have.
This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons:
- It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save? TOO BAD. Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
- And the flipside of that: that paying for live service games, you get consistent updates, new content, new cosmetics, etc, etc. You also get features like cloud saves. You don't have to worry about managing 100s of CDs or worry about a scratch on them or anything like that.
Is there a problem these days with online-only games being shut down? Yes, absolutely, and I hope the industry moves away from that.
Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD version?
All of us who never hooked the dreamcast up to the internet.
Dreamcast didn't have game patches over the internet. That wasn't a thing until the Xbox. You could, in rare occasions, download additional content (e.g. PSO had downloadable quests) but the vast majority of games were standalone.
A game doesn't need to be live service to support cloud saves, though. There are completely DRM free games on Steam that support cloud saves. And PC games that released on discs back in the day still could get updates.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
We downloaded patches or get them as an extra with PC gaming magazines just fine. On CD's... everyone backed up them at ISO's and mounted them with dedicated software.
That's not actually true.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
> make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
Very old games are a problem for windows and have a significant higher chance of running out of the box with proton on linux
can you provide an example?
This is a good point. I'm still looking for a good way for my kids to play mindrover on windows 11, and I haven't found one.
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
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.
There are indie games without those in-app purchases that capture the spirit of the old games.
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.
Is it your opinion of a game like Breath of the wild ?
Not so great games have existed as long as games existed. Parent's point is that the few good ones stay. And could imagine someone in 20 years replaying BOTW, or This war of Mine, same way Journey still has many active players 13 years later.
The article touches on multiplayer games which my comment reflected, they are after all the predominant genre that generates the most profit for companies, and of course are the most exploited.
I didn't say that there are no good new games anymore, there are of course good titles great games your example is one, but the market shifted because the cash is elsewhere.
If you compare the profit for a game like BOTW despite being huge success by unit sales, and the yearly profit of a game like Fortnite as some of the commenters pointed, or CoD you will see what I mean, those tittles literally print money with in game shops not unit sales.
I agree with you, and this was my main point in 20 years someone will replay BOTW because it is a great game, the ones that are made to simply print money will be replaced by others that prints money faster, and better.
> There is simply nothing to it
If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.
> no depth
If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.
> no cool mechanics
Subjective but I disagree.
> no story nothing
Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.
> 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.
I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
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.
Fortnite‘s dark design was the reason Epic was subject of the largest FTC gaming-related fine in history. $200m+
it's well know the hit box for "the defaults" (slang to refer to players with free character designs) are slightly larger.
but yeah, it's by far the least egregious case indeed.
No, this is just plain wrong. The hitbox is the same one on all skins. On payed skin like peely for example, the skin is bigger and will be more visible, but the hitbox stay the same. This is pay to loose if anything.
https://www.esports.net/news/fortnite/do-all-fortnite-skins-...
Do you really consider "esports.net" a source for the internal implementation details of a proprietary video game?
I consider it better than 0 source at all. I also have access to the decrypted assets of the game and can personally confirm but the value of that is nil since I can't bring proof.
I'm pretty sure you could find dozens of sources confirming that too, but I don't have the time atm.
Confirmed here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1agkxcd/the_gia...
(only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit box)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
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.
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.
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+Wh...
Well now i gotta find a way to play this
There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1].
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600.
Now that game was worth every byte.
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.
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.
City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community servers have a license from the publisher.
Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
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.
This is my favorite review comment on that game: https://www.gamespot.com/big-rigs-over-the-road-racing/user-... e.g.
> This comment on society is driven home (or in fact, not driven at all) even further by the computer AI. It doesn't even leave the starting gate. Much like the dreams and aspirations we harbour as youth, reving our engines on a starting line where the crack of the pistol never comes. Meanwhile, those of privledge cruise to easy victory, unconcerned over such mundane things as rent or grocery bills or collideable landscapes.
Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
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.
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
I thought WC3 was 1990s but I went an checked: 2002. Weird. I so associate Warcraft (excluding WoW) with the 1990s.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
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.
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.
Eve Online is over 20 years old, and still releases new game content, and has their annual FanFest get-together in Iceland.
RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons.
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
On the other hand, Overwatch 1 is dead because Blizzard said so.
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-maest...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The biggest problem today is ownership.
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
The whole industry's sprinting toward short-term gains at the cost of legacy, and the result is a graveyard of great games barely a few years old.
You can host them though, if you really want. Look at https://freeinfantry.com/
These guys wrote a custom server from scratch and have hacked up the original game itself as well. It's hosted completely by the community.
It's the same enshittification trajectory as everywhere else. It starts with a product that serves its users and once the money starts flowing in, users are turned into cattle to be milked and shorn.
so apparently, these 'users' are so lacking in agency that they willingly get milked.
If so, they deserve it.
There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.
> they willingly get milked.
> If so, they deserve it.
The majority of users have no idea that they are getting milked and their data end up in the hand of Ad companies and law enforcement.
I think it's time we as a society let go of this 7,000 year old tendency to place all blame for people suffering from how a society is set up, on individuals. Don't you think we can find a way to do that without taking away people's agency?
For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore."
So, we've tried pinning it on individuals for a while, it's clearly not the right angle. What else might be? Could it be that the systems analysis is on the right track?
100% agree - I usually use obesity as a simple example to make the point: "Our society became obese in a span of 50 years, how amazing that so many individuals lost their willpower!" Maybe there's a little more to it than that, eh?
> Some of those games are single player only.
Like which?
I know Command and Conquer 4 and Sim City (2013) both required server access at launch to run single player.
CnC4 never removed that requirement, and the servers did go offline. Ironic because older games obviously still run SP just fine, and updating to a new MLS shouldn't be impossible - honestly, it should be a basic setting exposed to the user in every MP game.
We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.)
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it.
Copyright and patents encourage creation and invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
Copyright is pretty broken at this point; the drop to zero cost for duplicating bits broke a lot of assumptions 30-odd years ago and we've been slow walking the consequences ever since. AI kind of punched it in the gut, but it was already wobbling. There's been a bunch of attempts to patch things, but there's a significant shear between the common understanding of copyright law, the actual current caselaw, and what you can get away with as either an individual or a corporation. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better--a lot of people have a lot of money invested on things that are increasingly divorced from the economic and social forces at work--but I anticipate a realignment similar to the post printing-press era. (Which took decades for the consequences to ripple out, so we'll probably be at this a while if that's at all comparable.)
Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once - would help a lot.
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation?
Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.
Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.
Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.
It's proof enough about the damage IP law did to culture to see current major American cultural artifacts being 50 year old star wars and even older Marvel comics. That's what current teenager's grandfathers watched.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
The grandparent specifically rejected letting the Mario IP enter the public domain. So whether or not it should, that's a completely different discussion from the one being held here.
You can share a game you own even if it is still under copyright.
I'm saying there's a middle ground--or could be, if the laws were changed--where companies can keep their IP, but reselling and rent-seeking on decades old creations wouldn't be possible.
For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.
That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
Is Mario art?
Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.
And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
A different question to ask is why the public is obligated to enforce artist's rights in perpetuity? And don't forget that artworks don't just spawn from a single mind - they are buit upon existing, freely available art and general culture, which isn't a subject to special protection in the first place.
I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.
Incorrect question. The correct question is assuming people are willing to share those old games for free (they are), why should we grant someone the right to stop them? Why should we grant people the right to block the creation of derivatives of 40 year old works?
These things don't even have economic value. E.g. excitebike was in the top 10 best selling NES games. How much would you pay as an investor today for global distribution rights?
Why should copyright last 70/95/120 years after death of the author/publication/creation (depending on the situation)?
Extension of copyright is theft from the public domain in a way that non-commercial piracy has never and will never be.
Because it doesn’t bring money anymore anyway. Nobody wins by it being unavailable anymore.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
Why not?
It's impossible to take seriously the argument that copyright is broken because people can't play 1 famous game for free. At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...
> At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...
They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy culture that I grew up on. It just makes copyright law a joke that people will reasonably ignore until it is less farcical. Oh no, boo hoo, they make a little bit less money; I’m over here playing (not a beloved game from my childhood, but) the world’s smallest violin in solidarity for the profits of the largest media conglomerate in the world.
Not trying to attack the above commenter but god damn am I sick of hearing how I should be paying money again to enjoy something I “““owned””” in my childhood. Fuck that every day of the week. I do not want to pay Nintendo to play Pokemon Red, I never will, and that is reasonable even if I choose to play it.
/rant
I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations.
As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.
I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
I play dota 1 again now! https://firstbloodgaming.com/
+1 I can relate completely.
I am a season 1 veteran, and even though I'd like to keep playing League, I only want to play some games per week at best
But without keeping up with the constant changes you can't play well, you lose matchups because with this and that change now Renekton loses to Camille lvl 7 even though it used to be the opposite just weeks before.
I now play only chess for this reason, I need an online game that I can master through my life without having to keep up with weekly meta changes
> As for shooters this is the same.
Worse. Why do i need to chat with a character in a FPS ? This is not an RPG.
My issue wit it is the "too much" is just fluff. I'm not overwhelmed because I'm oit of my depth, in that case I'd be excited to sink my teeth into a new system, instead it's pointless or borderline offensive fluff in my face.
It's interesting because the main trend in game-design is to 'streamline' and 'simplify'. The result is basically that they did the opposite of what we want to achieve in software design: modern game systems are shallow and complicated rather than deep and complex. One reason is that the older games that are still successful have emergent gameplay -- strategies that weren't planned by the developers but could be found by exploring the space. If it's so simple to make this analysis, why are these games affected by this problem? Because of business decisions. The games need to make players jump to new installments. To do this, they need a compelling reason other than 'we need you to pay full price again', so they introduce new mechanics. After 20 years of bloat where developers are afraid of abandoning the mechanics from previous generations a lot of systems became both too complex and too complicated, so they simplified by planning out the viable strategies, which generally collapse the hierarchy of strategy layers player could adopt. This homogenizing force is also greatly driven by e-sports/streaming, where games are designed to be enjoyed as a spectator. E-sports players want homogeneous strategies as it simplifies greatly adapting to the meta.
Tl;dr: it's a business problem of carrying the whole history of the genre to gather existing players. To simplify would mean take greater, explicit risk, and the industry has become risk-averse because of how much they've generally mismanaged themselves.
If you take Street Fighter 2, the game that laid the blueprint for all mainstream fighting game, there are a few important rules you want to know, like Dragon Punch having startup invincibility. Even then, if you don't want to learn, the game is instinctively approachable. The Street Fighter series introduced 'supers' that need meter to be used, and then systems to have options in how to spend that meter, which introduce some balance issues needing to have more options available in defense. So, in Street Fighter 6 they thus introduced "Drive Rush" with the explicit design concept of "1-button attack". So now you have 2 gauges, the gauge gauge and the drive gauge. But as the concept lays out, Drive Rush is extremely powerful, so you can't hop in without understanding how it works at a basic level. How much effort does it need to have that basic level? Just see [0].
BFV and 6 and all that are just bad tbh, I can’t imagine a competitive BF1/5/6 etc scene at all- it’s either aim assist hell, or just lowest common denominator of a gaming experience that stuffs you with stimuli and leaves 0 room for any tactics and communication let alone strategy.
For BF1942 adjacent experience try Hell Let Loose it’s really quite brilliant (and modern)
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:
"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.
Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
I want FOSS alternatives for every genre.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
If you're interested in a FOSS MTG clone check out XMAGE and Forge. They don't have every card but they do have a whole lot.
https://github.com/magefree/mage https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
Honestly, it's depressing to think how much creativity and community we've lost just because publishers want everything to be a closed garden with a checkout line
Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply survivor bias.
Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived.
I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.
Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.
https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
From the article:
"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July.
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually.
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
UT99 is being maintained with a community patch:
* https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
Is that the one you used?
A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
Right, when Doom came out, everyone who was interested in computer games and could get their hands on this game would absolutely do so. Similar for other major games like Diablo, WarCraft, Quake, etc. Even if someone didn't end up liking it, there was basically no chance they wouldn't at least try it because these were like THE games to play at the time.
A lot of that was because of piracy, though - and the piracy may even have been part of why they were so big. There were a ton of other games coming out at the time which have been mercifully forgotten.
This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.
It was more of a monoculture.
That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.
if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?
letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?
would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
I think it's not going to happen, precisely because of this. We think we have a certain taste, but as individuals, we hardly do. We want to feel like we are part of something together with other people, and for ultra-customized AI entertainment, it would have to lie to us to give us that (not very sustainable).
"I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!
You are right. I know that. That’s why I stay away from this and buy consoles. Only that they creeped in the same setup. One to play in better quality pay more. Or take the pedestrian version.
One of the listed games being CS 1.6 is only around because Valve didn't shutdown the master server. As EA/Ubisoft et al. are inclined to do. So it certainly could've and still readily could.
I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is:
>Server Hosting and LAN play
I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?
I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader
Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.
I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that...
If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.
I don’t really like having to convert EPUBs to mobi. I have had issues with Calibre breaking formatting back when I used a Kindle DX in like 2011. I am sure it’s better at conversion now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, so I like being able to immediately drop the EPUBs into a custom folder and point KOReader.
Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.
It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.
Makes sense.
I use Amazon's conversion tooling rather than Calibre (first kindlegen, now amazon.com/sendtokindle), and haven't noticed any formatting issues - and the website gives me wireless sync support too. No arbitrary TTF support or custom screen images, though.
Well one of my Kindles is actually a DX, which can only communicate via 3G which has long been shut down, meaning that the only way to send books to it is via USB, so I don’t think the sendtokindle would work with that.
I also wouldn’t want to use a cloud service if the books are obtained from an, uh, “unofficial” source. Again, not that I would ever do that, because that would be a crime.
"Far more people are playing UT99 than in the past as you just need to download it there and play it."
This is laughably untrue.
But mostly this article just says "old good games are old and good". It's nice that they run on anything, but comparing the current slate of new-ish games against... the entire history of PC gaming, I actually think new games are doing just fine:
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
Very few of those games you've listed are new games.
Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.
Fortnite: 2017
Apex legends: 2019
Valorant: 2020
Overwatch 2016
COD: Not sure which version you're talking about.
League: 2009
Dota 2: 2013
Roblox: 2006
Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old. How old is too old to be "new"?
"New" means you're dependent on an official server.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:
Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)
Apex Legends: February 4, 2019
Valorant: June 2, 2020
Overwatch: May 24, 2016
Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release
League of Legends: October 27, 2009
Dota 2: July 9, 2013
Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)
Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.
Well 1 person just now running the game. And 3 simultaneously today... Does 3 count as people? Steam's statistics are kinda wild at times.
I don't think any of those have private servers that you can run and host games in. They're all far too dependent on microtransactions and in-game-purchased items to implement that kind of robust and long lasting system. They will die because of this as soon as they are not profitable.
Oh, and Overwatch is dead and unplayable. Blizzard unilaterally killed it despite people wanting to keep playing. There is overwatch 2 but that is not the same game.
I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real.
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.
Old games being available has stopped enshittification and value extraction from VC and PE.
The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user.
The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore.
Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog.
MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
> The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
sadly true, it's almost comical how all other major game company can't seem to grasp why steam is so successful.
> MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
No it's not. Game Pass is very popular even with people like me who are massive fans of Steam. And it's been pretty successful for quite a few years now, so not sure what you mean by "trying to"
The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.
New AAA games are less viable if they can be cracked to delete their live service.
Right off the bat the author determines that all recent video games are “disposable pieces of slop”.
Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games?
Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day.
There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
I don't disagree per se with any of the OP's points, but back in the day I know why I started to dislike newer ones... the console era became "tier 1" and PC became "tier 2".
Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter".
Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios.
Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing.
That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
This era is also hectic .. more games, more often, more of everything. Hard to go deep into one thing maybe.
There are lots of new games that will never die. Look at Nintendo games.
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
Even without matchmaking issues, it can be difficult for new players to break into a community of diehards who have often been playing together for years.
This perfectly encapsulates the new Fatal Fury game. It's such a great new release but all the Fatal Fury old heads absolutely obliterate any new players, especially players from more popular backgrounds like Street Fighter or GG Strive.
MSX games were terrible, that is what pushed me into programming, a game I'm still playing.
I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
He means "multiplayer games" though.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
People are pointing out that it's survivorship bias, which is true. But you also have to admit that the game development meta has changed. Microtransactions, gambling, FOMO... it seems like games have gotten more psychological. Like, gamers are being targeted psychologically, using the same sophisticated influence techniques used by casinos or bars or whatever. People haven't caught on that modern researchers have basically "solved" some aspects of human psychology. Especially the aspects that cause us to spend money and to pay attention to things. People also haven't put 2 and 2 together that we're now using these techniques on children.
Old games were created to tell you a story, or surprise you with unusual environment, or unique gameplay, or some mix of above.
These days games are created on the base of monetisation with everything else intended to hide the fact that the goal is to pump as much money from you as possible.
AMD recently annoyed the gaming community - who are among the most susceptible to unnecessary upgraditis - by saying that friends don't let friends buy GPUs with more than 8GB VRAM. If you look at the Steam hardware surveys, that's probably true. An M-series Macbook can play most stuff that isn't current AAA. Proton let's you play virtually anything on Linux and it's incredible (plus the Steam Deck). There's no point buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service.
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.
I think this is still survivor bias though, and the games that traditionally offered map editors still do. There are a lot of games nowadays that allow user-contributed levels/content if not full-on mods.
To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date.
Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.
In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).
Wait, what are you talking about ?
Because AMD also recently announced the cheapest (?) new midrange GPU with 16 Go of VRAM :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/amds-radeon-rx-9060-xt-want...
https://wccftech.com/amd-says-8gb-vram-is-sufficient-as-majo...
It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):
> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
That's right. No one is "annoyed". AMD has the best value 16 GB GPUs on the market.
There is an 8GB version of the 9060. Perfectly suitable option for the majority of gamers around the world.
If you're an EU citizen and care about video game preservation, I highly suggest joining the European Union Citizen's Initiative in this link. Even if you don't care about video games, it could end up having pro-consumer ramifications for software ownership in general if it manages to go anywhere.
For more information checkout Ross's Scott's YouTube channel, Accursed Farms. Here's an introduction video:
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
Another important point about old games is their file size. When games are under 1 megabyte, you can literally cram thousands of games in a thumb drive and forget about it. It makes them resilient. Someone probably has a copy of the abandonware not because it looked worth preserving but because it was extremely cheap to preserve. By contrast, if your game is several gigabytes, that's several orders of magnitude more expensive to preserve and distribute.
I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen.
But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.
I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
> "LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode".
To me "LAN mode" always referred to hosting a server on your own machine while having a self-discovery mechanism on the LAN and no exposure over the WAN, which means you launched the LAN mode and computers on your LAN can see you and join, but not computers outside.
Maybe, but I can't recall a game having separate buttons for these : so it's Direct IP connect with maybe LAN advertising (it would make more sense as a checkbox).
(Computers outside won't see the advertising, but can always be port forwarded to join inside.)
It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
Increasingly, games are more like events, in the past they weren’t. What you pay for is really like a ticket to participate. If you’re not playing a game with people right when it’s new, when the hype is at its peak, you will miss out on the shared experience and social conversation. There are many games out there you could only have experienced at their full potential for a limited time.
You could play the game years later, but it’s a lonelier experience, like watching a show that everyone’s already watched and discussed to death.
You just have to accept this. There is no point in hoarding games and building some huge backlog so you can wait for that one day where you finally have time to sit down and play them all. That day is never going to come. This is your life, happening right now. Play with your friends, your kids, play often. Sooner or later it’s all over.
Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
(Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.
>It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming?
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
>Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games”
There are still a lot of racing and rhythm games at arcades.
This is probably a regional thing, but in my experience they're in decline.
The arcades near me, which have all opened within the last 5 years typically have one car racing game, maybe one motorcycle game, one dance game, and the other 50 or so games are just slot machines for kids.
In Australia we used to have a few arcades dotted around the place but I haven't walked past one in a long time. But whenever I go to Japan I'm amazed at how vibrant their arcade scene is. It seems much more communal as well - go hang out at the arcade with your friends.
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
The recent wave of early-access indie co-op horror games is proof of that (i.e. Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Backrooms, R.E.P.O., etc.).
They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
Kinda.
There's a lot of very good single player games out there that this does not touch on.
I think it is somewhat true for certain crowd. Like say tv series that are run on schedule. There is certain amount of shared existence when everyone is watching or playing at same time even with single player games.
On other hand you can be outside this crowd and still enjoy the games at any times. But having larger crowd enjoying them at same time can be special experience.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
