from Hacker News

Why old games never die, but new ones do

by airhangerf15 on 5/24/25, 9:29 PM with 324 comments

by mattnewton on 5/24/25, 10:21 PM
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 stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
by zeroq on 5/25/25, 3:19 AM
The biggest problem today is ownership.
There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only.
You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place.
I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure CD_ROM in the attic that will urge them to find an old system they could try it on. My accounts will likely be wiped out after short period of inactivity.
Carmac made a historical move when he hosted a Quake tournament and offered his Ferrari as a reward, because he cared. Or maybe he sold his soul and the devil told him that esports will be a thing in the next 10 years. Point is - developers cared. But today, with the mcdonaldization of the industry you have countless situation like with the recent Rollerdome. Game had a stellar reviews but it didn't matter, because the moment before the game was launched the whole studio got sacked. Every single on of them.
Sure, we had issues in the past, the famous "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis", but today it's on a whole new level. People are naming their companies "Respawn" to indicate that they still have willingness to fight the system. And google how it turned out for them.
And then, when you finally thought there's a light at the end of the tunnel you have an endless stream of vaporware on kickstarter or projects that are - like Tarkov - for 8 years in "early access" (hey, don't be a dick, sure it's rough around the edges, but it's still in beta, bro).
All in all it was fun and games, but now it's a multi billion business now.
I've spent some time in the industry and when asked I always say it's a great adventure if you're young and have no major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice.
by Buttons840 on 5/24/25, 10:31 PM
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 invention. Trademarks protect consumers. These laws should not do more than this.
by overgard on 5/25/25, 5:16 AM
I think another reason might just be: simplicity. A lot of these older games are much easier to pick up and grok.
I remember I used to play a ton of Battlefield 1942 back in the day (like, in a competitive clan, going to LAN parties, that kind of thing). I tried picking up Battlefield V but I just gave up because it felt like there was just too much going on. It probably has a host of other great things, but my main reaction playing it was this is too much and I'm overwhelmed, and that's coming from someone that grew up on competitive multiplayer games.
by fnordpiglet on 5/24/25, 11:24 PM
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 survivor bias.
by sandspar on 5/25/25, 12:09 AM
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.
by deadbabe on 5/25/25, 12:13 AM
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.
by DarkNova6 on 5/24/25, 10:24 PM
A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.
While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.
Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.
Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.
by tobylane on 5/25/25, 9:04 AM
My theory is that we are asking the wrong people. We love old games because we played them when we were young. We should be asking similarly young people what games they don't want to die. One possible answer is that they have so much choice that they find another and don't have the loyalty from scarcity we did.
Back in the day, if you liked Theme Hospital and wanted more, the nearest game was Theme Park (now we have CorsixTH and OpenRCT2). These days, by way of so many more games, something close enough can be recommended, found, pirated.
by alkonaut on 5/25/25, 7:22 AM
Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
by 999900000999 on 5/25/25, 5:59 AM
I want FOSS alternatives for every genre.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
by pflenker on 5/25/25, 4:19 PM
That article suffers from a strong case of survivorship bias. Yes, old games die, they go away and are long forgotten - only very few „never die“.
The same is true for new ones. Since the barrier to create games is way lower than in the past, more games are created today leading to even more games dying and fading away. Newer successful games will be remastered and rebooted for as long as there is a business case for it.
by BlueTemplar on 5/25/25, 1:05 AM
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity
No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.
"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.
It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
by wcoenen on 5/25/25, 9:37 AM
Unreal Tournament is given as an example of an old game that never died. But I've tried to play it with a group of friends, and we found it too buggy. Unmaintained games will stop working eventually.
First there was a brightness problem; the game was too dark on multiple computers to be playable. Eventually we found a patch somewhere for that. Next we noticed that the player hosting the game could run much faster than the others. We gave up after that.
by __turbobrew__ on 5/25/25, 12:02 AM
I play older games because they are still fun and dont require a $1000 GPU to run. Games like Team Fortress 2 are still quite active and fun. Also, the game is free and can run on a toaster.
by xeromal on 5/24/25, 11:17 PM
I think the only thing out of this list that's necessary is:
>Server Hosting and LAN play
by jokoon on 5/24/25, 11:43 PM
I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real.
I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.
by ofcourseyoudo on 5/24/25, 11:39 PM
"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
- Overwatch
- COD
- League
- Dota 2
- Roblox
Heck there are still people playing Phasmophobia.
by larusso on 5/25/25, 7:39 AM
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
by tombert on 5/25/25, 3:28 AM
I jailbroke my Kindle recently, because I am a little frustrated that Amazon can just decide that a book isn't mine anymore, even when I have ostensibly "bought" it.
I know I could just buy physical books and sidestep this issue, but I have a lot of trouble reading small print as I get older [1] so the Kindle just works better for me since I can make the font gigantic, and the Amazon store is super convenient to buy books.
But these megacorps can just take my shit away from me, whenever they want. Fuck that.
Turns out that it's cartoonishly easy to jailbreak the Kindle Paperwhite, install KOReader, and then just drag and drop EPUB files on there. Now Amazon doesn't have the ability to steal my stuff.
Games are another issue that I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I have over 700 games on Steam, and Steam has been a great, reliable service for me going on twenty years now, but there's no reason to think that this will last forever, or even that much longer.
GOG is DRM free, so I have every installer (for every platform) of my ~100 games backed up on my RAID in the event that they start yanking stuff, but as far as I am aware there's no way to do that with Steam.
It's bullshit. I hate DRM, I hate that I didn't push back against this sooner.
[1] Not a vision thing, I can distinguish the letters fine, just have a lot of trouble keeping my place on the line with small print.
by squigz on 5/24/25, 11:18 PM
How am I supposed to take an article seriously that starts like this, clearly betraying the author's unfamiliarity with the reality of gaming?
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties. Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Anyone who genuinely believes this represents most games should do themselves a favor and stop focusing solely on the current trendy multiplayer game. There are countless fantastic games today, and there are many MMOs that aren't the MTX hell that the author seems to think every multiplayer game is.
by BlarfMcFlarf on 5/24/25, 11:20 PM
Ver few competitive games can survive, because you need a huge player base to maintain a skill based matchmaking ladder 24/7, and the moment you dip below that critical number the game is doomed since new players are locked out. Its winner takes all. Everyone stills tries to make em for the big potential upside, but they are always very high risk.
Single player, and non centralized coop, are a different matter of course, and you can’t really compare them. But the big “AAA” shoot for the big wins of live service and thus often fail.
by ivape on 5/24/25, 10:43 PM
The current crowds move together through games. If everyone is not into a game, it dies because the friend group never goes "lets all go play that". Current game marketing is centered around influencers really pushing the idea that "this is the place to be", they don't really sell any other vibe. It's like club hopping.
by consistentlytop on 5/25/25, 9:11 AM
Games are looked at the same way like other businesses, if there is a way to make money they will take it. They are backed by investors who want to see returns. Long be gone the times games were about gaming.
And the biggest problem is, if there's demand for these practices they will keep appearing. If people keep giving into the micro-transactions why would developers stop implementing them?
It also depends what kind of games you want to focus on, competitives require new content = $$ for development vs single player one time purchase.
And that's another topic for discussion, where you're paying/supporting the game and don't see the love/quality. You can see how sloppy publishers became, e.g. Blizzard with Overwatch as prime example, being overtaken by Marvel Rivals (chinese devs). They use the same tactics but make peope feel heard with their feedback, dev communication, and implementation speed.
by gmerc on 5/25/25, 10:55 AM
Old games being available has stopped enshittification and value extraction from VC and PE.
The cost of new games has reached a point where that kind of capital is needed but the value extraction mechanisms these funding methods require don’t work when there’s competition from old games that allocate more value to the user.
The hardware upgrade train stopped about 2019 too because more expensive hardware scarcely makes a difference for modern games anymore.
Steam, as a privately owned company ensuring old games stay available is single handedly responsible for all kinds of attackers, legacy publishers and Big Tech from gaining control over ecosystem or backlog.
MS is trying to fuck around with game pass but it’s doomed with Steam.
The moment of truth will come when Gabe Newell gives up control
by BlueTemplar on 5/25/25, 12:05 AM
Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req...
(Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
by dartharva on 5/25/25, 5:36 AM
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.
As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.
by nagaiaida on 5/25/25, 10:14 PM
> Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-d...
yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming
by whatevaa on 5/27/25, 6:09 AM
Games are not food. We can live without them.
AAA studios driven by shareholders are just stupid. There is a cap of consumer spending in the gaming industry, can't get more as people simply will not spend more. Spending has already plateaued.
Games like factorio/satisfactory/dyson sphere program/witcher/cyberpunk/etc are new era and are great. Factorio will definitely stand the test of time.
Maybe people should look more into non-competetive games before making a generalized comment about everything.
by hyperman1 on 5/25/25, 8:14 AM
The first 2 Thief games ate interesting:. They still have a relatively active community, but the executable is hard to run. Then most of the source code leaked, and new releases started from that.
The result is a zombie game. The fans won't let it die, but the copyright limbo won't let it live.
Transport tycoon had a bit of the same, but managed to grow out of it by piece by piece replacement, with ttdpatch, openttd and fully new graphics as important phases. So it is possible to slowly escape this fate if the fanbase is interested enough. But it is a hard, multi decade effort.
by Dove on 5/25/25, 9:07 AM
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
by pabs3 on 5/25/25, 7:17 AM
It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
by firesteelrain on 5/25/25, 12:03 AM
I don’t really expect the servers to be maintained forever. It would be nice not required if the server side was open sourced so people could continue playing the server required games.
by AlienRobot on 5/25/25, 1:22 PM
Another important point about old games is their file size. When games are under 1 megabyte, you can literally cram thousands of games in a thumb drive and forget about it. It makes them resilient. Someone probably has a copy of the abandonware not because it looked worth preserving but because it was extremely cheap to preserve. By contrast, if your game is several gigabytes, that's several orders of magnitude more expensive to preserve and distribute.
by calibas on 5/25/25, 3:16 PM
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Yes, and that's always been the case. From Wikipedia:
"The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
There were so many buggy, unfun, barely-playable games released that it poisoned the market 40 years ago. The term is "shovelware", and it's always been a problem in the industry.
Go try the worst games of the Atari 2600, modern games the seem mediocre will become amazing in comparison.
by dragonwriter on 5/25/25, 4:56 PM
Survivorship bias: if an old game is still around now, it is far out on the resistant-to-dying tail of games of its era.
Lots of old games died.
by xchip on 5/25/25, 2:17 PM
MSX games were terrible, that is what pushed me into programming, a game I'm still playing.
I hated the MSX blocky scroll while at the same time I envied the smooth scroll spectrum games had. Games also were hard and short, across all platforms, including the point and click ones. So, they were not so good, is only the nostalgia what makes them good.
by everyone on 5/25/25, 1:47 PM
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
by joshvm on 5/24/25, 11:06 PM
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 buying a $1000+ card for gaming. You're better off subscribing to a game streaming service.
Was mod support that common back in the day? Morrowind was pretty revolutionary in that you could load the entire "level" into the Construction Kit and see how the professionals built the quests. A few other games were released with map editors (I remember Age of Mythology having one). I feel like the games that can be moddable are notable.
Otherwise servers have always been a problem for developers. Do you let people self host and run the risk of rampant cheating on random servers? Or do you centrally host and eat the cost? I do think that the option of self-hosting is important. For every counter strike there are tons of abandoned RTS games that have nobody playing any more.
by wileydragonfly on 5/25/25, 12:11 AM
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.
by john-h-k on 5/24/25, 11:10 PM
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Su...
by atlgator on 5/28/25, 6:48 PM
Does it have anything to do with barriers to entry for modern games? Just about any modern PC can play Crysis, but you'll need some new hardware to play GTA6 when it comes out.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL on 5/26/25, 9:04 AM
There are way better games now than before what is the article even talking about. Are they looking only at AAA and multiplayer games?
There are a gazillion indie masterpieces out there, go play!
Game design has improved dramatically in the last 20 years, enjoy that.
by dismalaf on 5/25/25, 4:30 PM
It's literally survivorship bias. There were tons of shitty old games. The ones we remember are the good ones.
And AAA publishers don't want to admit it, but gameplay trumps graphics. If I want to see something that looks like real life, I go outside.
by POM37 on 5/25/25, 9:53 AM
Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
by protocolture on 5/25/25, 4:00 AM
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.
Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.
Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.
WoW has Mangos.
by ChoGGi on 5/25/25, 1:54 PM
One of the listed games being CS 1.6 is only around because Valve didn't shutdown the master server. As EA/Ubisoft et al. are inclined to do. So it certainly could've and still readily could.
by V__ on 5/24/25, 10:35 PM
I think survivorship bias and nostalgia are bigger factors. Besides that, there are many more game releases now than ever before, so it is much harder to land a hit which will “survive” over the years.
by nottorp on 5/25/25, 7:01 AM
He means "multiplayer games" though.
Most single player games work just fine(tm) if you apply the right amount of emulation, regardless of age, and they can't be killed by their IP owners.
by smeeger on 5/26/25, 12:22 AM
old games will die as soon as all the millennials die. its so weird how much millennials love to read historical accounts of things that they already know. 90% of HN knows what it was like to play CS 1.6… but this article relates that information as if it were ancient knowledge being unearthed for the first time in centuries.
seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
by ololobus on 5/25/25, 9:14 AM
The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.
Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:
1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well
2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.
3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.
UPD: formatting
by jakubmazanec on 5/25/25, 3:51 PM
My favourite old games I like to replay every few years: Jagged Alliance 2 (with the great v1.13 mod) and Railroad Tycoon 2.
by agumonkey on 5/25/25, 10:58 AM
This era is also hectic .. more games, more often, more of everything. Hard to go deep into one thing maybe.
by iFire on 5/25/25, 1:24 PM
New AAA games are less viable if they can be cracked to delete their live service.
by davidcbc on 5/25/25, 4:16 PM
Just the opening paragraph of this article is pure hogwash
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
There are absolutely incredible games still being made across genres. BG3, Hades, Clair Obscur, Celeste, the Horizon series, Balatro, Void Stranger, Elden Ring, these are all examples of all time great games in their respective genres and they all came out in the last 10 years.
> Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers are pulled (sometimes comically fast, like with Concord), while other games are endlessly changing “live service” games where they get endless updates and free content at the expense of having microtransactions in all their predatory varieties
Final Fantasy XI is still around and it's been going for over 20 years. WoW and FFXIV are as well. You can quibble over what "modern" means, but WoW and FFXIV are still getting full expansions and even FFXI got new content as recently as 2023.
> Just like how arcade gaming died in favor of “redemption games” that act as gambling for kids minus the regulations of casinos, video games have fallen victim to endless microtransactions and FOMO events designed to keep people coming back to play for another week or so. They’re designed to maximize money at the expense of the core experience.
Some have, but there are absolutely games that have not fallen into this trap.
It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts from such an unserious place
by petee on 5/25/25, 5:30 PM
I played Oregon Trail last night on archive.org -- what a great resource
~6000 on Farmer :)
by phendrenad2 on 5/25/25, 12:00 PM
There are lots of new games that will never die. Look at Nintendo games.
by throw7 on 5/25/25, 1:15 PM
I don't disagree per se with any of the OP's points, but back in the day I know why I started to dislike newer ones... the console era became "tier 1" and PC became "tier 2".
Something as simple as the ux being designed for gamepads made for a second tier gameplay experience on pc. You see this even to this day where bungie's marathon has auto-aim assist for a supposed "boomer shooter".
Also, and maybe more importantly, the dev shops then were smaller and were more self-critical about what is actually a good game? It was the early days of the video game industry exploring the medium before the ridiculously bloated budgets of today's AAAA? studios.
Lastly, I am very critical of today's world-building in games. We don't have storytellers any more, but something called "narrative designers". Those empty heads are hired to tell me what to think. It's absolutely soul crushing.
That said, there are still gems out there. I hesitate to mention them because ultimately art is subjective; but one that gave me an ice pick to the head (in a good way) is Death Stranding.
by veunes on 5/25/25, 3:11 PM
Honestly, it's depressing to think how much creativity and community we've lost just because publishers want everything to be a closed garden with a checkout line
by throwawaybob420 on 5/25/25, 1:53 PM
Right off the bat the author determines that all recent video games are “disposable pieces of slop”.
Why would anyone actually read this? Does this guy actually play video games?
Baldurs Gate 3? Hades 1/2? Poe? Last Epoch? Counter Strike? Schedule 1? iRacing? Literally can do this all day.
There’s always shit video games and there’s always fun video games.
by Farbklex on 5/25/25, 8:01 AM
It's rather sad for this generation. We still host retro LAN parties regularly to play games we love. Flatout 2, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3, Half Life Deathmatch. Those games are about 20 years old and play just fine. We grew up with them, and they hold up to today standards amazingly well.
I kinda doubt that today's kids will be able to play Valorant, Apex Legends or Battlefield 2043 in 20 years when they host a "retro" LAN.
by coolThingsFirst on 5/25/25, 10:33 AM
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
by protocolture on 5/24/25, 11:40 PM
>It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
This article is more "slop" than the worst video game made today.
by leecommamichael on 5/25/25, 3:48 PM
1. The article is about multiplayer games, not all games (as the headline would imply.)
2. I thought they might be talking about design decisions that make for "lasting fun" but really they're advocating for design decisions that afford the game being functioning software without the corporate entity which produced it continuing to breathe life (and money) into it.
I think it's fine that things die. Also my god that first line is a flaming hot take.
> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.