Re: Old Games For The Win

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:50:03 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

>
>
I mean, most games I like are in the 2000-2015 ish range, with the oldest
pc game being spess13

To be fair, that tendency of yours /could/ just be based on numbers.
After all, you're comparing a 15-year range (2000-2015) to a your "new
games" era, which is only a 10-year period (2016-2025).

The advantage becomes even more apparent when you remember that first
15-year range was a particularly bountiful time in video-gaming. While
overall there are more games released now,* the vast majority of those
are tiny Indie releases that are either incredibly niche or are
outright scam-games. But the number of games released by medium- and
large-sized publishers (you know, the ones most people actually
_play_) has decreased dramatically.

So you might be playing more old games simply because _there are more
old games to play_. ;-)





 =========

Which made me, out of curiosity, look to see what my own habits were.
Fortunately, I have a spreadsheet! ;-)

     [less nerdy people who don't care about analysis of what
      games I played can skip the rest. Mostly the following
      was done for my own amusement. Really, just stop here.]

.

Looking back at the last 26 months, I see that I played 140 games. 95
(67%) of those games were, at the time that I played them, less than 6
years old.

       [85 (60%) of these were less than 4 years old; 50 (35%)
        less than 2 years old, 26 (19%) were less than 1 year.]

So while I'm not rushing out to buy and play a lot of the newest
titles, neither do I stick with only older games.

.

But maybe I just don't like new games from the 'big publishers'? Let's
poke the data some more. I classified 54 of the games as "Indie"
games, and the rest coming from more "Established" publishers

      [Although the line is pretty blurry between the two
       sometimes. For instance, I put SCS Software - the people
       who make my beloved Truck Simulator games, into the
       "Established" category. An Indie, for the purposes of this
       survey, is typically a much smaller studio with much smaller
       games. YMMV].

Of those Indie games, 42 of them were less than 4 years old (77%). Of
the 54 Indie games I played, I quit 15 (27%) of them before getting to
the end (which is usually a sign that I didn't enjoy them). Only 20%
of the Indie games that I quit were less than 4 years old.

I played 86 games from "established" publishers and developers. 42
(48%) of them were less than 4 years old. I quit 6 (7%) of them before
getting to the end (half of them were less than 4 years old).

.

The TL;DR seems to be that overall I tend to split my time between old
(more than 6 years) and new games pretty equally. I tend to focus
slightly more on games from 'established' developers and publishers
rather than focusing on small Indies, although the latter are given
fair opportunity. If we go simply by the "I don't care enough about
the game to finish it to the end" metric*, the trend seems to indicate
that I think the quality of Indies is growing faster than
"established" games, but the latter still have an advantage.



.





* this really is a lousy metric, though, since I often play games I
quite dislike to the end just because I feel I should get my money's
worth. Especially since I'm more likely to quit a game I am replaying
over a game I'm playing for the first time, and obviously older games
are more likely to be replayed. For a better analysis I really should
have imported my 'scores' (from Yet-Another- Spreadsheet!) that I give
to all the games I've played. That was just a little bit too much work
for me, though ;-)