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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

#231

Post by veunes »

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…

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

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

#232

Post by calibas »

> 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.

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

#233

Post by veunes »

safety1st wrote: post #185
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…

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 N…

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.

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

#234

Post by veunes »

zeroq wrote: 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…

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.

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

#235

Post by sitzkrieg »

ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #171
mattmanser wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#236

Post by tumsfestival »

jmyeet wrote: post #205
tzs wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588

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-ti…

>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.

That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.

Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...

Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.

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

#237

Post by Nasrudith »

komali2 wrote: post #177
chii wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 f…

The reason why blaming individuals is so popular is because everything else is ultimately some degree of obfuscation. The most problematic part of bureaucracies of all sorts (be they government or corporate) is the ability to arrange a structure so that nobody is at fault.

Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of who is capable of changing things for not doing so.".

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

#238

Post by armada651 »

Gigachad wrote: post #87
CrossVR wrote: 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.

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.

Yet if you gather up a group of friends you can still play these old obscure multiplayer games because it didn't rely purely on the master servers being maintained forever.

No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.

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

#239

Post by Firehawke »

wcoenen wrote: post #146

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 tha…

Yeah, no, you need to run the community patch. As noted before in the article, it's being actively maintained by the community. You wouldn't expect a 1.0 launch version to run well in 2025.

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

#240

Post by parineum »

safety1st wrote: post #185
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…

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 N…

Those games are the paper plates of the industry. Disposable crap not meant to last. They're rarely good in the first place because that same mindset leads to bad decisions for gameplay too.

RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.

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