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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

#41

Post by whstl »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #21

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 s…

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...

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

#42

Post by johnb231 »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #25

"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 - Overw…

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrY...

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

#43

Post by sandspar »

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.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #22
joshvm wrote: post #12

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…

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 pre…

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by wileydragonfly »

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.

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

#46

Post by ijk »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

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 inventio…

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.)

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

#47

Post by deadbabe »

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.

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

#48

Post by Ekaros »

cempaka wrote: post #31
ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #25

"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 - Overw…

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.

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

#49

Post by Spivak »

CrossVR wrote: post #20
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.

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.

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

#50

Post by BlueTemplar »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

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 inventio…

Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once - would help a lot.
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