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.
For me, I didn’t have the mental energy. At a previous job, I was so mentally strained working 8 hours nonstop on highly mentally taxing tasks that even if I wanted to play a game, it felt like a chore rather than something I can enjoy or wind down to. Even if I had the time, since I do other stuff outside of work.
The strange thing is, when I work I have the money but not the time nor energy to justify buying games to sink time into. When I don’t work I have the time and energy but not the money to justify paying $80-$100 on a game I probably won’t play as much as I think otherwise.
I’ve in recent years looking more into reviews and such to weigh in whether or not I want to buy the game in the first place. Compare that to years prior when I could look at a trailer or short snippet and get a good idea of what the game has to offer. Now I’m more weary of grindy game mechanics and predatory micro transactions.
Well, gee, I wonder why. Not like their money isn’t going more for necessities after all
Yeah. People have no money. Ask one of the billionaires to prop up this failing industry.
Edit: /s
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
My main reason for not buying games is that epic and amazon give them away for free.
I’ve got a backlog of around 500 games I haven’t touched or paid for, so there’s plenty to do without paying for anything.
subscribing to humble monthly is also a good way to amass games on the cheap. not as cheap as free, of course, but still better than most sales.
there are also almost no new games worth even looking at anymore. There are some, but they are quite rare
In the AAA space, sure
and indie games are cheaper and better
Yeah, why would anyone buy another copy of Mario Kart with minor changes for €80 when there’s much better indie games for a quarter or less of that price?
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.
I don’t really follow current games. Is there actually a huge increase of AI games?
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.
Feels a bit like the 80s market crash. Too many low quality games flooding market.
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.
Almost like they have no money to spend after rent and food.
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)
To be fair, the kids are just a pretty good indicator of where this whole boat is headed. Someone who’s been adulting for a while probably has savings and is willing to burn some of those to keep doing the hobby they like, especially when they’re invested with hardware or friendships that exist through gaming.
Could it be that the economy fucking sucks?
Nope, clearly it’s our fault for not just going out and buying stuff.
They don’t come out with original work that gets people interested and/or they enshittify the franchise. If GreatGame was good, we’re on GreatGame VI with microtransactions, paid skins, fortnite play, no immersive single player campaign, and ads with no real change to anything else.
Look outside AAA gaming. It‘s never been better.
Almost. It was better a few months ago before the payment processors started threatening the game platforms
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.
As someone who’s first laptop was a Dual Core with 6GB of RAM, I appreciated when Indie Games ran amazingly on it. It was a life saver
As a millennial, the games today are mostly shit. I’m currently playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and it’s amazing. I had a blast with DK Bananza as well. Deltarune was nice too. But before that? AstroBot. And before that? I don’t know. Usually I play a demo of a game, if that’s not available I pirate it and play for half an hour or so. If I like it, I buy it. If I don’t like it, I won’t buy it and won’t play any further. And on top of that, a lot of games released today are just remakes of games that themselves released on PS3/Xbox360/PC. I mean “The Last of us remastered”??? That game was released on PS4, so I can just pop it in my PS5 and play it. But now the devs want me to pay $70 to have it a tiny bit better looking?
“Lost Soul Aside” will release later this month. I remember years ago when I first heard of this game, made by a single person (who now got a team of developers from Sony). And I will definitely get that. No demo required.
The games today are not mostly shit. There’s so much great stuff that comes out every year that it’s difficult to keep up with it all. It’s just not usually the stuff that gets the most marketing. As a bonus, the best games of the year rarely ask for that $70 price point. What are you looking for?
As a person who doesn’t care about graphics: New games are mostly shit. I’m allowed to do less (need animation for each action you know?), I must have fewer monsters on the screen (polygon count you know?) takes 35+ GB and it makes my laptop fans go wrooom?
New games are not exclusively pushing high end graphics. In fact, they’re dwarfed by those that are not. My favorite game from last year was The Rise of the Golden Idol. It’s mostly still images and takes up less than 3 GB. Balatro was a game of the year nominee from last year, and it’s only a handful of MBs. Blue Prince is hardly a looker, but it will likely be on a lot of game of the year lists this year. There’s so much out there.
Back then we had 10x games coming out, 1x games were good. Now we have 10000x games coming out but still 1x of the games are good. (Absolutately more good games, relatively almost nothing)
Numbers are generated knowledge assisted-out of my ass. (Think fermi approximation.)
What good games did come out this year, that’s
• not stated in my comment
• not a remake/remaster
That I’ve played
- StarVaders
- Avowed
- Split Fiction
- Blue Prince
- Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
- Knights in Tight Spaces
- Rift of the NecroDancer
- Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
- Keep Driving
That I’m currently playing
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
That I want to get around to but have no idea if I’ll find the time
- Eternal Strands
- Door Kickers 2: Task Force North
- Civilization VII
- Commandos: Origins
- Bionic Bay
- Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
- Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
- Cyber Knights: Flashpoint
- The Alters
- Ruffy and the Riverside
- Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream
- Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
- Mafia: The Old Country
That I want to get around to and haven’t released yet
- Borderlands 4
- The Outer Worlds 2
- Mina the Hollower
- Dispatch
- Mouse: P.I. for Hire
- Constance
What a crazy statement. My bottle neck is time not lack of games - there are just too many incredible games there!
I feel like the big name titles are all headed in a similar direction (realism, large open world, story-driven), because they need to differentiate themselves from the indie titles that cover the other bases for cheaper.
So, if that direction isn’t your jam, I can certainly see that you’d feel that way, because you need to inform yourself more actively to learn about those indies.
If you want a medival semi-sim with amazing Monty-pythonesque writing, check Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
I’m honestly split between it and 33 for my GOTY, they’re so different but both so amazing.
Playing it now, while it does have its comedic moments, it feels like a huge misrepresentation to call it Monty Python-esque.
Did industry try to raise prices even more? Maybe higher prices is what’s missing for gaming industry to blossom /s
The seven seas are way more friendly
I sometimes forget GenZ are now adults. Some now do porn.
Well you cant say that without giving some recomendations around here
