Re: Can Games Get Any Better (2024 Ed)

On 24/03/2024 18:15, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

It's not quite the wild days of the early 80s (when every idea was
new), or even the 90s (when all the ideas were being reworked) but it
feels like there is a very subtle change going on, of the sort that I
feel was largely missing throughout the early part of this century.

I think the 80's were a period in gaming that can probably never be replicated as it's the time when home computers came into the reach of a mass market (within a year pretty much most of my school friends had either a Spectrum* or a C64) and the games market boomed with the first wave of arcade type games before you started getting developers realising that you can do something else as you didn't need the draw of just one more 10p for another game.
You also had quite a rapid development of what a home computer could do and it wasn't that many years before all of a sudden we had Atari ST's and Amigas in the shops.
As for what's going to happen in the future, difficult to say but I can see the PC games market** as a whole becoming more fractured into sub-groups. That's always existed to an extent but it does feel as though it's a shift away from what we had twenty years ago.
*I did just check on Spectrum sales figures and it's a grand total of around 5 million units of which I presume most were sold in the UK.
**As a side note it's one of the things that annoys me about a certain section of gamers. The seem to think that they somehow own all of PC games and if you don't agree with them then your opinion doesn't matter as you're not a 'real gamer'.