Re: Hot New Games Aren't

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:10:12 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:51:34 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
older games you played?

>
My most played games on Steam are from 2000-2010 or so. But I am also
playing a bunch of freebies and I don't really have any idea when they
came out. I doubt any of them came out in 2024.
>
I  never played a 2024 game in 2024 I don't think. I will likely not
play a 2025 game in 2025. I don't buy games from the big studios
anymore. They don't make games that I like. I do buy indie titles, but
even then, I buy them when they are on sale. And then they sit in my
library until I get around to playing them.

I played an unusual amount of new games this year. Well, unusual for
recent years; back in the day it felt like I was getting and playing a
brand new game every week. But for a good while, until 2024, I was
focussing more on older titles.

But this year I spent a good amount of time (and money!) on games
released in 2024; 7 games to be exact (or 9 if you include the
truck-sim expansion DLC), all of which I played to completion. That
number goes higher if you include games "less than a year old when I
bought and played them" (such as the "System Shock Remaster", which
released in May 2023 but I played in January 2024). If you include all
of those, my total of "brand new" games goes up to almost a quarter of
_all_ the games I played in 2024.

Furthermore, the vast bulk of the games I played definitely fell into
the "less than 8 years old" category, with only 9 games released
earlier than 2016. The oldest game I played fully in 2024 was "Jedi
Knight", released back in 1997.

But like I said, that's actually fairly unusual. After having spent so
much time in previous years with older titles, I was ready to get to
cutting-edge games again, so I splurged a bit. Now, having caught
myself up, I'm ready to submerge myself back in the old.

     [Well, except for those silly truck-driving sim
      expansions. Those I'll always buy Day One ;-)]

It's more difficult for me to say how much TIME I spent on these new
games in comparison to the older titles, though. Still, of all of the
games I played this year, there were only five I didn't play to
completion, and none of those were games released in 2024.


Of course, all this discounts all the games I fired up, puttered
around with for twenty or fifty minutes, then put away again. I do
that with a lot of my older DOS and Playstation games and never list
them in my monthly recounts since I don't consider those games really
"played". And then there's stuff like Doom; over the course of 2024, I
probably put in ten or twenty hours of play with that game, but it was
thirty minutes here and an hour there over the course of a year. That
happens with older games like "Civilization 1" or "Master of Orion"
too. It's a lot of "I can't think of what else to play, so I'll just
fire this old classic up to while away some time until I can think of
something better". It adds up, but doesn't get 'counted'.

But the overall TL;DR is that I played a lot of games and some of them
definitely came from 2024 :-)