Everyone is.
I don’t buy new releases anymore.
Why?
Cause the prices are getting stupid. Cause its all digital downloads with no physical product. Cause my “ownership” can be revoked at any time by the platforms whims or the platforms shutdown.
What happened to digital downloads being cheaper, anyway? Thats the promise we were sold 10+ years ago. That by sacrificing physical products, Publishers/Devs wouldnt have to pay for printing, manufacturing, shipping, storage, etc, so they’d be able to sell AAA new releases for 30 dollars, and Pub/Dev would still make more money.
And now we’re supposed to be paying 60, 70, 80 dollars or more, for these digital download games… that we don’t even own? And because they have no product on the shelves, prices never come down either. Sure, you might find a sale like on steam or something… but those sales pale in comparison to what they were 5, 10 years ago
Fuck that. Amazing how the only promise fulfilled on moving to digital download was that pubs/devs would get more money… and they get that by skyrocketing the costs, not because of the sacrifices we made to give up boxes, disks, manuals, and ownership
I hope they make it abnormal to own a $3000 gaming pc in middleschool again.
As a old member of Gen Z, i can definitely say the prices aren’t helping. A lot of people in my age group just don’t work from what i’ve seen, so with 70$ and sometime 80$ games they aren’t going to be buying many. On top of that, and this may just be the people i’ve exposed myself too, but most of them don’t want longer experiences. They’d rather plop down with something like FF14 or Mario Kart and play that over and over and over again. That’s not a bad thing, but i definitely think it’s not helping. And like i said, this might just be the people i expose myself too.
True, I enjoy games like Spelunky and old arcade racers a lot more. Play for a bit and leave it. No story to worry about.
I can definitely get that. I like to keep a good few games on hand i can just hop into after a long day, it’s nice to be able to kick back with smaller games even if my favorites are always bigger story games.
It also helps that most indie titles don’t need the latest and greatest hardware. I have a budget laptop and it runs most indie games well at 1080p.
From my perspective as a millennial, people are running out of time and energy too.
Like, I know a couple, both working, no kids, avid and techy gamers who know to play stuff like KCDII, yet they mostly plop down for YouTube at the end of the day. A VG or longer form TV is too draining, and too long.
Video games have been my biggest hobbies for basically my entire life, but I barely play them anymore for basically this reason.
Yeah. People have no money. Ask one of the billionaires to prop up this failing industry.
Edit: /s
Could it be that the economy fucking sucks?
Nope, clearly it’s our fault for not just going out and buying stuff.
Why buy new when I have a backlog, the PS1/2 catalog emulated, and can wait 6+ months for a sale
I recently softmodded my ps2 for about $30 (freemcboot memory card and large usb drive) and I’ve got hundreds of hours of nostalgia driven gameplay ahead of me. It’s incredible to think that I have about 40 old, amazing games for less than half the price of a single new AAA game.
Its not that we cant afford them necessarily, its that we cant justify them. The main reason you needed to get the new game was because all your friends were getting it. Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games. CoD is where its at bro. When everyone moves to the new game you can lose social time with friends or you can spend another £50. Now that everyone is poor, enough people aren’t migrating to the newest shiniest edition immediately and people are playing games they already have.
Couple that with desperately working every opportunity you can every hour and adults just don’t game together any more.
Tl;dr they are not feeling the social pressure to buy any more.
Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games.
Some people actively avoid multiplayer games to avoid obnoxious, entitled kids.
you don’t want to be told to kill yourself and have children tracking down where you live and threatening to call the police to your house
you just cant handle the bants
dweeb confirmed
How are you going to be on Lemmy, a super-niche, nerdy-ass platform, and call Single Player gamers dweebs lol?
Happy dweeb/nerd confirmed here. Single player, story-driven is where it’s at.
Y’all, this market is beyond saturated. And the AI gaming people are flOOOoding the space with more and more stuff.
In terms of a fun way to spend an hour or two, or a few go-to games, there’s unlimited options, many free or free enough. Meanwhile, everyone churning out titles expects full attention and wishlist and dropping $50 on them for simply existing.
There are also some games with active modding communities that can be played basically forever without getting boring.
Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.
Is Rimworld worth it? I’ve seen quite a lot of it, but it looks hard to get into (and it’s really expensive for an indie game).
It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.
Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,
If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.
As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.
Thanks for the review, that’s helpful! How much micromanagement does the game do? Does automation exist?
Important point with the DLCs, that’s really good to know!
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.
Sounds pretty nice tbh. I might give that a try.
Less money to buy games, cost of games go up, quality still crap, riddled with micro transactions. Why buy a game when it comes out when you can wait to buy it on a sale while you play your backlog and by the time you buy the game it will be the best version because they had time to fix it up, almost never to the degree it should be but still the best it’s going to get
That’s exactly why I love !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works. It pays to be patient.
Thanks for another sub for me to find game deals, much appreciated.
I think SOME of it has to do with AAA being dogshit, but I think a lot of it is actually that they just play roblox. I have been told “why would I buy peak when roblox has this mountain climbing game for free?”
You’re thinking of Gen Alpha. GenZ was born starting '97, most of us are closer to 30 than 13, they don’t play Roblox or know what that is. All they know is eat hot chip and twerk and cry for a world that never was yet feels was taken from us while watching old vine compilations and being able to recite them word for word with impressive if slightly concerning accuracy.
Judging by the comments, reading the article seems to be a lost art. Here’s the image for y’all:
It’s very specifically about 18-24 year olds, compared to last year, with video games seeing the steepest decrease.
You can stop complaining about games being soulless, unless you want to claim that wasn’t a problem last year. Well, you can, but it’s unrelated then. Compared to last year, this age group has felt the need to cut back at everything more so than anyone else.
We’re headed for a crash, and the junior positions are the first ones that CEOs think they can replace with LLMs (they can’t but that will take a few years to bite them in the ass)
