I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?
HN is always telling us to be outraged when an online game is shut down, but by the time they get shut down, hardly anyone cares about playing them anyway, they moved on to newer stuff.
And in the VR realm there aren't a ton of large story FPSes now. Especially not of this caliber.
Hard disagree here. Some subgenres don't even have any newer games at all.
And even for genres that have been embraced by the mainstream, often they are all polished into the same shape. Yeah, there are plenty of conveniences now that older games might not have but a lot uniqueness is also lost in the process. How many modern games still expect you to navigate an environment yourself instead of feeding you questmarkers and triply-redundant messages and reminders of what you need to be doing next? How many shooters that just focus on the shooting instead of feeling the need to add some skinner-box-inducing RPG-lite mechanics. How many Point & Click adventures that even come close to scope or engrossing art styles of the classics? Why is Planescape: Torment still considered one of the best (C)RPG stories by many when writers had almost 25 years to surpass it?
Yeah, if you pick a random game from the 90s and a random game from today, then the latter will perhaps be more playable. Many old games have plenty of jank that wouln't fly today. Because today's games are designed for just that: so that anyone with half a braincell can complete them. That means ecessive hints. It means refusal to provide challenges that might limit your market. It means limiting the amount of text because everything needs to be voiced which costs a lot. It means repeating mechanics that "work" instead of daring to try something unique.
> I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
Yet people still listen to classical music and everything in between then and now. Some even mainting their own collection. Are you really going to say that for every Mozart or The Beetles or Black Sabbath or whatever there is a 2020s group that pulls of the concepts better? Does the warm fuzzy sound from old analog recordings prevent you from enjoying them as much as older graphics do?
Of course the answer to what is better also depends a lot of taste. Just like with music, the predominant styles of games shifts over time.
Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is.
Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam.
"Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it.
I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.