Been unable to catch these for a bit, but I'm not surprised I've come back to another banger article.
Topically, I've defaulted back to a lot of my old comfort games, namely Team Fortress 2. The past few weeks, when I've finished with work for the night, I'll play a few casual rounds of payload. (Is there any other way to play?) I wonder if, for a lot of us well into adulthood and/or middle agedness, there's also some aspect of "playing the old songs and watching the old movies," so to speak? These games don't just hold entertainment and familiarity, but also memories of times gone by with friends that we might not see or have as much time with anymore.
A lot of us who grew up in the middle of the console generation that really started to push more and more into the mainstream grew up not only with the great games of the time, but also many that were just before. Folks are STILL making youtube videos about SNES and Genesis games, or weird PS1 games, despite those being covered many times even as much as 10 years ago, and yet people are still going back to revisit the classic and the novel from those libraries.
As an aside, I wonder if the blurring together of the different consoles and personal computers, of few exclusives and even of generations, as games continue to be re-released or backwards compatable, has fundamentally changed the way that people currently think of games? No longer a limited library constrained to a piece of hardware but instead an endless ocean of variable depth and quality.
Really agree with this. The urgency that I once felt to play only the "newest and best" games has faded a lot as time wears on. The longer gaps and less meaningful leaps between console generations is definitely a part of that.
I don't know what kind of hardware you might be packing on the PC side of things, but if you're running an - at this point - older and suboptimal machine like I am, you might not even be able to PLAY the "newest and best", lest your desktop burst into flames!
I think though it's also a lot easier to try something old that's stood the test of time or to play whatever is currently popular rather than go out and search for the unknown. Especially if you're somebody who takes some convincing to try something out! There's a reason that companies bombard you with advertisement, after all. The potential customer's first response isn't necessarily the same as their final one.
So many thoughts and so much work to do that is keeping me from writing an essay, but a very long story short - video games are kind of morphing into what tabletop games have been for decades. Graeme's list, and your fifth addition, match up with a lot of my experience in watching games like D&D, Magic, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Warhammer dominate their categories in tabletop year after year.
I really appreciate this post, although it does make me feel old.
The thought of spending thousands of hours over a period of years on one game is really... strange to me.
The points you mentioned - connecting with friends, growing your in-game-skills, etc. - make sense, and I know these "forever" games continuously add new content, but even with that, I would think these same thirty or so games would grow stagnant at a faster rate for more people.
It'll be interesting to see how the gaming industry evolves over the next decade or so. F2P will continue, no doubt, but with so many failures over the last several years, I can't see it lasting long outside of mobile.
At minimum it seems like a super safe prediction that there will be no more than maybe 10 or so successful F2P game launches on PC and consoles throughout this decade. We're halfway through and already averaging less than one per year.
Great read. My choice of poison was League, though the mild inconvenience of the always-on anticheat got me to drop it. We'll see if Worlds gets me back in.
My thought here is sort of covered by what Kennedy said about the skill element of lock-in, but I think a related phenomenon is people gravitating to low friction/low activation energy games. I see so many people talk about this online when it comes to "backlogs" or the great variety of single player games they want to play but don't actually ever touch: the idea that it takes some non-insignificant amount of work to actually bring yourself to try something new, and that most of the time they can't bring themselves to do it so they find themselves "defaulting" to their live-service game of choice.
Obviously live service games are not really low friction or low activation energy when you're new, but afterwards they can turn into the sort of entertainment you just boot up without thinking about it (or while listening or watching to something else) and it doesn't feel like you've had to make a commitment to anything. A parallel phenomenon in my mind is the tendency to watch one 'comfort' show repeatedly (e.g. The Office.)
But I dunno. Maybe this isn't really related--certainly it doesn't quite match what you're saying about dabblers. Or maybe I'm overestimating the number of people who think this way based on the forums/subreddits I tend to read.
I definitely think there's something to the "friction" vs. "comfort food" argument. Last week after playing a bunch of games of Deadlock I experienced a feeling I hadn't felt in a long time—that little voice saying "just one more game." Before I knew it I'd booted it up and was hovering the Play button. It felt JUST like the old days with League and TFT. Shockingly low amounts of friction between me and a 40 minute game session.
"If Discord’s new foray into games pans out, it could become a threat to a lot of big more traditional live service games."
Hard disagree. Discord's activities are bite sized games aimed at bolstering the social environment. Even if they did expand it, the most it would compete with is where the teens are.
After all, a card game night on Discord can't compete against a Helldivers vacation... But perhaps the teens weren't at all interested in vacationing in the first place?
I could really go either way with Discord's stuff. Like obviously they're actually driving traffic *toward* games. Their success is a boon for the industry. But when we're specifically considering the big free-to-play live service titles that are hungry for hours, any hours spent on Discord's platform instead could technically be competing.
Still feels like the exact same question, though. It's like asking why the traditional gaming market (regardless of price point or service) couldn't compete with the juggernauts of Facebook F2P games, why traditional games couldn't just pull hours away from the hyper casual even in that era.
Sure, Discord’s pulling in and crystallizing their communities. But when the limitations are definitely hard baked as they were in the flash game era... The competitiveness of releasing a F2P live service today would feel the same to me.
"I do not care about them" re: mobile games caught me. Question for you Ryan: Do you have a strong opinion on the 'games industry' being lumped together as a single entity? I sometimes think to myself, how is it we're treating 'gaming' as one industry ("bigger than movies and music combined!") when maybe 50% (total guess) are in reality non-gamers who play candy crush while taking a shit? Should that kind of 'gaming' be called something else, or do our definitions work well enough to serve their purpose, and we should just accept that gaming comprises a very diverse group of people/level of interest and engagement? Have you written about this before/do you think our monolithic view of 'gaming' brings with it any problems?
I think "forever" gamers are a very visible minority. They've always been around - thirty years ago, they were the Ultima Online guys and twenty years ago they all played Counter-Strike and WOW. But they are a minority, just a very visible one.
This is where the F2P and triple-A market went off the rails. It's fighting for a very active but relatively small pool of players. Granted, there are exceptions, such as Stardew Valley, but I don't see many games trying to copy its success. Everyone is instead trying to make the next Team Fortress or Path of Exile and hoping they can grab a portion of gamers from a pool that's smaller than it appears.
Been unable to catch these for a bit, but I'm not surprised I've come back to another banger article.
Topically, I've defaulted back to a lot of my old comfort games, namely Team Fortress 2. The past few weeks, when I've finished with work for the night, I'll play a few casual rounds of payload. (Is there any other way to play?) I wonder if, for a lot of us well into adulthood and/or middle agedness, there's also some aspect of "playing the old songs and watching the old movies," so to speak? These games don't just hold entertainment and familiarity, but also memories of times gone by with friends that we might not see or have as much time with anymore.
A lot of us who grew up in the middle of the console generation that really started to push more and more into the mainstream grew up not only with the great games of the time, but also many that were just before. Folks are STILL making youtube videos about SNES and Genesis games, or weird PS1 games, despite those being covered many times even as much as 10 years ago, and yet people are still going back to revisit the classic and the novel from those libraries.
As an aside, I wonder if the blurring together of the different consoles and personal computers, of few exclusives and even of generations, as games continue to be re-released or backwards compatable, has fundamentally changed the way that people currently think of games? No longer a limited library constrained to a piece of hardware but instead an endless ocean of variable depth and quality.
Really agree with this. The urgency that I once felt to play only the "newest and best" games has faded a lot as time wears on. The longer gaps and less meaningful leaps between console generations is definitely a part of that.
I don't know what kind of hardware you might be packing on the PC side of things, but if you're running an - at this point - older and suboptimal machine like I am, you might not even be able to PLAY the "newest and best", lest your desktop burst into flames!
I think though it's also a lot easier to try something old that's stood the test of time or to play whatever is currently popular rather than go out and search for the unknown. Especially if you're somebody who takes some convincing to try something out! There's a reason that companies bombard you with advertisement, after all. The potential customer's first response isn't necessarily the same as their final one.
So many thoughts and so much work to do that is keeping me from writing an essay, but a very long story short - video games are kind of morphing into what tabletop games have been for decades. Graeme's list, and your fifth addition, match up with a lot of my experience in watching games like D&D, Magic, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Warhammer dominate their categories in tabletop year after year.
Oh that's super interesting. I can absolutely see all those factors applying to tabletop.
I really appreciate this post, although it does make me feel old.
The thought of spending thousands of hours over a period of years on one game is really... strange to me.
The points you mentioned - connecting with friends, growing your in-game-skills, etc. - make sense, and I know these "forever" games continuously add new content, but even with that, I would think these same thirty or so games would grow stagnant at a faster rate for more people.
It'll be interesting to see how the gaming industry evolves over the next decade or so. F2P will continue, no doubt, but with so many failures over the last several years, I can't see it lasting long outside of mobile.
At minimum it seems like a super safe prediction that there will be no more than maybe 10 or so successful F2P game launches on PC and consoles throughout this decade. We're halfway through and already averaging less than one per year.
Great read. My choice of poison was League, though the mild inconvenience of the always-on anticheat got me to drop it. We'll see if Worlds gets me back in.
My thought here is sort of covered by what Kennedy said about the skill element of lock-in, but I think a related phenomenon is people gravitating to low friction/low activation energy games. I see so many people talk about this online when it comes to "backlogs" or the great variety of single player games they want to play but don't actually ever touch: the idea that it takes some non-insignificant amount of work to actually bring yourself to try something new, and that most of the time they can't bring themselves to do it so they find themselves "defaulting" to their live-service game of choice.
Obviously live service games are not really low friction or low activation energy when you're new, but afterwards they can turn into the sort of entertainment you just boot up without thinking about it (or while listening or watching to something else) and it doesn't feel like you've had to make a commitment to anything. A parallel phenomenon in my mind is the tendency to watch one 'comfort' show repeatedly (e.g. The Office.)
But I dunno. Maybe this isn't really related--certainly it doesn't quite match what you're saying about dabblers. Or maybe I'm overestimating the number of people who think this way based on the forums/subreddits I tend to read.
I definitely think there's something to the "friction" vs. "comfort food" argument. Last week after playing a bunch of games of Deadlock I experienced a feeling I hadn't felt in a long time—that little voice saying "just one more game." Before I knew it I'd booted it up and was hovering the Play button. It felt JUST like the old days with League and TFT. Shockingly low amounts of friction between me and a 40 minute game session.
"If Discord’s new foray into games pans out, it could become a threat to a lot of big more traditional live service games."
Hard disagree. Discord's activities are bite sized games aimed at bolstering the social environment. Even if they did expand it, the most it would compete with is where the teens are.
After all, a card game night on Discord can't compete against a Helldivers vacation... But perhaps the teens weren't at all interested in vacationing in the first place?
I could really go either way with Discord's stuff. Like obviously they're actually driving traffic *toward* games. Their success is a boon for the industry. But when we're specifically considering the big free-to-play live service titles that are hungry for hours, any hours spent on Discord's platform instead could technically be competing.
I'm kinda bullish on the new web-tech based stuff they're doing, tho. A little more reading on the topic: https://a16zgames.substack.com/p/why-web-gaming-died-and-how-its-coming-back
Still feels like the exact same question, though. It's like asking why the traditional gaming market (regardless of price point or service) couldn't compete with the juggernauts of Facebook F2P games, why traditional games couldn't just pull hours away from the hyper casual even in that era.
Sure, Discord’s pulling in and crystallizing their communities. But when the limitations are definitely hard baked as they were in the flash game era... The competitiveness of releasing a F2P live service today would feel the same to me.
"I do not care about them" re: mobile games caught me. Question for you Ryan: Do you have a strong opinion on the 'games industry' being lumped together as a single entity? I sometimes think to myself, how is it we're treating 'gaming' as one industry ("bigger than movies and music combined!") when maybe 50% (total guess) are in reality non-gamers who play candy crush while taking a shit? Should that kind of 'gaming' be called something else, or do our definitions work well enough to serve their purpose, and we should just accept that gaming comprises a very diverse group of people/level of interest and engagement? Have you written about this before/do you think our monolithic view of 'gaming' brings with it any problems?
I think "forever" gamers are a very visible minority. They've always been around - thirty years ago, they were the Ultima Online guys and twenty years ago they all played Counter-Strike and WOW. But they are a minority, just a very visible one.
This is where the F2P and triple-A market went off the rails. It's fighting for a very active but relatively small pool of players. Granted, there are exceptions, such as Stardew Valley, but I don't see many games trying to copy its success. Everyone is instead trying to make the next Team Fortress or Path of Exile and hoping they can grab a portion of gamers from a pool that's smaller than it appears.