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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

#121
post #61

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…

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.

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

#122
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#123

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 cha…

The problem here is that you are seeking perfection. Simply play with a non-optimal configuration and enjoy!

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

#124
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.

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

#125

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 ba…

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.

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

#126

> 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 H…

> "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.

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

#127

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…

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].

[0] https://wiki.supercombo.gg/w/Street_Fighter_6/Gauges

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

#128
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.

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

#129

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…

Imagine if copyright actually had a reasonable time limit.

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

#130

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.

"I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"
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