I think it's worth giving the author some benefit of the doubt that he knows his audience and is not speaking to the entire world, including future generations, all at once.

It's also obvious given the context of the very next sentence that he doesn't mean this as literally as you've interpreted.

Right?

When people are arrogant enough to claim predictive trends in something as complex as human psychology, I get doubt.

I enjoy the technical insights tho.

How much arrogance is needed to assume a rhetorical flourish is a deep personality flaw?

I don't understand what you're trying to say?

"serious hobbyists" would've already heard about Braid and be in the "played it already" category

Even if you're putting in 10-20 hours a week, you still have to pick what you play. When Backloggery was more popular, it was quite common to see profiles with dozens or hundreds of "I want to play this when I have the time".

Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.

there's a reason why such "watch later"-style lists are so long

chance of any individual game on that list getting played by you approach zero

and that falls exactly into the second outlined category

either the game grabbed your interest on the first try, or it won't push you over the "interested, but not now" hump in every next encounter

>It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to.

It's in my Steam library. I'll get around to it eventually. Or perhaps my kids will do so before me.

> (Braid, in 2009)

Braid had already made a pretty big indie-game splash in 2008 on the Xbox 360 as part of Xbox Live Arcade though the PC release was in 2009.

I was lucky enough to have played it before the Xbox release back in June 2008 on PC as a beta tester (Jonathan Blow was on the quartertothree forums and recruited testers there in the run-up to the Xbox release, iirc).

Apparently I was using Windows Vista at the time because some of the bug reports I can see in old emails are about how Braid's DirectX fullscreen mode was broken in Vista.

In English, and indeed in all human languages I am familiar with, it is common for people to make what seem to be absolute statements but are in fact understood to just be stating what they consider to be the most statistically likely state of things, disregarding outliers.