PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
Feels like Destiny.
People are reading the headline and assuming they're talking about older single-purchase games, but the article is actually referring to mostly MTX-driven games that get continuous updates.
And the data further shows, in Newzoo's own words, that these 908 million "PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games."
Remember that even things like Rocket League are about a decade old at this point, and games like LoL, Dota 2 and CS:GO are even older
Factorio considered older?
Probably? I have memories from over a decade back so
DLC is new..
Because we have a giant backlog of steam sales.
& Indie games
Most new AAA games suck, that's why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
Helldivers 2 came out in 2024
By definition, that's last year, so it's an old game.
Bwuh?
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They're too expensive, often don't run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don't have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won't enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It's why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I'm going to buy a title.
What's your opinion on Dome Keeper?
New AAA games suck.
I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I'm just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90's. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
I don't know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it's hard to make good games period. I'm not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
This would be a great time to promote !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol
!newcommunities@lemmy.world is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
That reminds me— I gotta do another Fallout: New Vegas run.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it's a way to add some new life to the thing.
Yes, actually that was my intended next run! I just gotta remember how to set up everything.
I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like "games are a waste of time". But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.
Also I've been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it's still fun
I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.
if you mean i do spend my time playing nes and snes via emulator, you are right
When people found out PhysX doesn't work on the new Nvidia cards I saw several people here on Lemmy say that it doesn't matter because almost no one plays older games. I seriously don't understand how anyone could think that, it's astoundingly stupid and ignorant.
I'm playing Fallout 4 right now. It's not the only game I play by any means. Too many new games are overly focused on graphics or monetization. I'm always trying new games and the better ones often don't have the best graphics. We want 2010 gameplay. Hell, I'll still play Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition, but older games usually need resolution and texture upgrade mods. Fortunately a lot of great old games actually get them.
What about new games, like world of warcraft.
I don't even know what the newest game I even own is... Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it's DLC, I haven't bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I'm going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
Yeah, I've lost track myself. I just follow feeds that alert of me free deals.
I actually learned that I can't even sort my Steam library by release date because of this thread. Otherwise I would actually know lol
I do not. I haven't played a gamer older than thirty years old in years
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games...
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today's games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don't follow it.
But yeah...there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
There are some downsides, though:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it's not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
\ 6.4% were in League of Legends
\ 6.2% were in Roblox
\ 5.8% were in Dota 2
\ 5.4% were in Fortnite
That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don't have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of "how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?"
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it's a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead --- well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money --- and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it'd still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I've played, because I've spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you'd think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just...doesn't matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you've pretty much got it figured out.
besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.
I read every one of those and thought. Well that's a new game. Apparently I'm old.
Apparently I’m old.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone's grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you've played in its original form.
I'm playing Counter-Strike 2
... exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod
... that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago
I don't get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
People don't get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
The game may be old but that doesn't mean a particular person has played it before.
11.35% of the human population.
I have hundreds of games on steam.
I mostly play minecraft.
My games library is so huge, and I suffer from choice paralysis all the time.
You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I've used it before when I can't pick what to play. You can apply filters too.
Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.
I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
It's wild how good the cheap games are these days. I'm 30 hours into playing Noita, have hundreds of hours in Vampire Survivor.
And I got about 15 hours into Dragon Age: Veilguard before it occurred to me I could crack open the Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition and actually have an enjoyable experience.
I’m 30 hours into playing Noita
I kind of want more there. There isn't DLC, and there aren't clones.
I mean, yes, the game is large and very replayable, and I have a blast with it...but it's also kind of the only option for that gameplay.
I also play it modded with health regeneration, because the difficulty level on the vanilla game is very high, and encourages very cautious play.
Does "older games" only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft... all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it's a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn't paint a clear picture or tell any story except "live service games work"
launches Baldur's Gate.exe ♪♫ "Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick led the way. Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick ran away." ♪♫
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are "six or more years old", and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I'm playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
For me, definitely older and indie (old and new). I don't get a lot of time these days to sit at my PC. Using my steam deck primarily these days is part of the reason I'm playing older games, but seriously I have a problem with steam/gog/name a storefront/ backlogs. I have so many games already, great time to review what I bought because of hype but never played.
Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don't have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money to buy them.
Where my Civ 6 people at?! Wooo!
I saw a stat on Civ VI steam page today that 45 000 people were playing it at that moment. That counts for something!
Civ4 is the best Civ.
UnCiv yo
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I just didn't like games/am depressed/games are getting BETTER, actually.
Games as a whole are getting better, but AAA is getting worse.
Indies are so good right now, and most without crazy DRM!
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It's kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
In general, I'd agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you'll find something great.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
I have a large backlog of five(?)+ plus year old games that are really good and I have yet to play. I'd much rather burn through those enjoying them on high settings instead of playing current games on low settings while trying to dodge crap monetization.
Yep.. lol I spend an embarrassing amount of time playing EverQuest 1 emulation servers.
EQ emu's ftw!
Quarm? THJ?
THJ right now!! I've been playing on emu servers for so long. I've played on almost all of them.
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90's. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn't even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software's games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don't know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you're still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn't personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn't really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so...shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I'd check to see if it was on Steam too.
I got that bundle at 92% off and it took me 2 years to finish. It was awesome
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add "color" along the way, but they don't fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I've developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so.. it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn't execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore.. and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3's happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ "jail breaking". Modern games have this expectation that we "know" everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often "find out" about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev's patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens.. well.. thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda... empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you've pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I've got a damn vampire and they aren't weak during the day and OP af at night?
Never played it, but this type of game is up my alley. For what it's worth:
I have been playing Galaga regularly since 1981. Still play it at least once a week.
While I agree that some of the reasons are because of industry direction and affordability. I do have to mention also that it could also be because of nostalgia, familiarity, simplicity and people still chipping at their library.
Upvoted for mentioning simplicity.
92% of my playtime is Minecraft, makes sense.
World of Warcraft.
The most expensive game I've bought recently is Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries, which came out 4 years ago.
With different mods each playthrough can be quite different too. That's why easily modable games are awesome for their price. Of course I just like being in a big shooty mech to blow stuff up so may be biased on that one in particular.
Me a fraction of a fraction of the gamer community playing only recent PCVR games and also Noita.
Any recs for person who enjoyed HL Alyx (+ community mapsets) and Ancient Dungeon VR?
If you like roguelikes like ancient dungeon i would highly suggest until you fall and for a more story based game if you haven't played lone echo 1 and 2 you're in for a treat.
New games are steaming piles of shit most of the time nowadays.
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It's just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
900 million population is more than enough.
\
(And that much better if they are all gamers :))
