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Why old games never die, but new ones do

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Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#11

Post by CoastalCoder »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #6
mattnewton wrote: post #2

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 stuf…

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.

I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600.

Now that game was worth every byte.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#12

Post by joshvm »

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#14

Post by Ekaros »

esseph wrote: post #10
ivape wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#15

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #3

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 mor…

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#17

Post by squigz »

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#18

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#19

Post by bitwize »

mattnewton wrote: post #2

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 stuf…

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.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#20

Post by CrossVR »

mattnewton wrote: post #2

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 stuf…

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.
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