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.
> 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!
I think this is largely just us aging, not a broader consumption pattern. Our neuroplasticity declines, our nostalgia grows. I still listen to music and watch TV shows that I did in my late teens / early 20s. But I'm sure zoomers have no interest in Futurama, the same way I have no interest in The Brady Bunch.
That's a good point, though I think that there's also an element of whether or not a work has a timeless quality to it. The Brady Bunch is definitely a show in its era and for its era, after all! I'd say the same for Futurama, since a lot of its humor and references is tied to the pop culture of the time. (As an aside, that's speaking about the works as a whole rather than more poignant stories or good qualities of the shows that could still be appreciated today.)
But, on the other hand, there are movies and tv shows that are still considered masterpieces made a long time ago. Books from hundreds of years ago still read today, games from 40 years ago still played today by new audiences, and so on. Shakespeare is still around, after all!
I agree with you in that it's also an element of aging, but some things, at least, carry across culture through the filter of time to modern people. In 50 years folks aren't going to remember the McDonald's SNES game, but there's a good chance Chrono Trigger. Final Fantasy, and Super Mario World will still be played, I would be willing to bet.
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.
"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?
Have a lot of thoughts but I think yeah interactive entertainment doesn't make sense to speak of as a single market or culture, any more than you'd lump everyone who watched a movie or streamed a show or watched cable news together as "screen watchers"
"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.
FYI the term "Grizzled Veterans" was actually coined internally at Riot (by my wife!) as part of the player frustrations tracker. That's why we were able to track its % of the playerbase over time, unlike most of those one-and-done external market research agencies.
Great read! I especially liked the point about institutions reinforcing lock-in. I think games have long had the potential to become "forever hobbies" (similar to other media fandoms like Tolkien and Star Wars), but recent live service innovations and the CoD / sports games assembly lines have allowed developers to properly monetize and build systems to reinforce the lock-in.
I imagine meatsports went through a similar period of rapid development and lock-in, when the big 4 north american sports were institutionalized via MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA. Who knows what other local sports were played at the turn of the century that might have become an american staple, but failed to due to whatever chaotic butterfly effect processes are at play.
Unfortunately, I don't think breaking their stranglehold is easy or likely. That first developer "how to un-stick players" point seems like hopelessly wishful thinking:
> 1. A new game introduces an exciting new genre combination or a huge technical advance on the genre
I'm sure Supervive, Spectre Divide, Multiversus, and their ilk are praying that this is true, but all the evidence I've seen to date says it's not. Cricket never took off in NA, and Baseball never took off in India. (Pickleball is the rare exception here). It's not the game, it's the institutions that surround it.
This pretty much happens in all forms of gaming, way beyond videogames. Games that become successful enough eventually become cultures, and when they do then players are in for the long haul.
However I don’t think that means they’re all wrapped up forever as it’s also been the case for a long time, but never in totality. At a hazy estimate, I’d guess maybe a third of available players are locked in.
The more likely cause of liveops game difficulties, IMO, are that they are often not distinctive enough (they replicate metagame design from each other especially, which is fundamentally boring for players who already know those metagames). Secondly they often don’t come with a compelling story to the world of the game they’re pushing, which makes them sound kinda blah.
Liveops games for core gamers especially need to push both of these envelopes to capture interest.
There is a strange breed of gamers like me that exist that never played any of the live service games. We’re mostly hardcore Nintendo fans. We’ll sink hours into Mario and Zelda, etc. Zero interest at all in any of the games listed as sticky. I’m interested in seeing play styles and things I haven’t seen before. Not every Mario game changes things up, but there’s usually some fun surprises along the way. The last first person shooter I loved was Goldeneye on the N64.
As an entrenched FFXIV player, I can get behind this point.
It's true, I vacation on other games. The way I juggle it: I play FF14 in the 'background' of new release games. So its my go-to game if I have nothing to play.
What that means however, is that I'm less likely to just pick up a game for the sake of trying something new. I need to be sold before I play it. That's either through a combination of reviews, hype, or seeing that's it a game produced by a studio or developer that I already like. Word of mouth is also a huge factor. I've tried a lot of games on the recommendations of friends (Another Crab's Treasure is a good example from this year).
Has it narrowed what I play? Possibly. But, before FFXIV, I'd replay older games when I had a gap in new releases. That now just happens less.
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.
> 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!
I think this is largely just us aging, not a broader consumption pattern. Our neuroplasticity declines, our nostalgia grows. I still listen to music and watch TV shows that I did in my late teens / early 20s. But I'm sure zoomers have no interest in Futurama, the same way I have no interest in The Brady Bunch.
That's a good point, though I think that there's also an element of whether or not a work has a timeless quality to it. The Brady Bunch is definitely a show in its era and for its era, after all! I'd say the same for Futurama, since a lot of its humor and references is tied to the pop culture of the time. (As an aside, that's speaking about the works as a whole rather than more poignant stories or good qualities of the shows that could still be appreciated today.)
But, on the other hand, there are movies and tv shows that are still considered masterpieces made a long time ago. Books from hundreds of years ago still read today, games from 40 years ago still played today by new audiences, and so on. Shakespeare is still around, after all!
I agree with you in that it's also an element of aging, but some things, at least, carry across culture through the filter of time to modern people. In 50 years folks aren't going to remember the McDonald's SNES game, but there's a good chance Chrono Trigger. Final Fantasy, and Super Mario World will still be played, I would be willing to bet.
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.
"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?
Have a lot of thoughts but I think yeah interactive entertainment doesn't make sense to speak of as a single market or culture, any more than you'd lump everyone who watched a movie or streamed a show or watched cable news together as "screen watchers"
"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.
FYI the term "Grizzled Veterans" was actually coined internally at Riot (by my wife!) as part of the player frustrations tracker. That's why we were able to track its % of the playerbase over time, unlike most of those one-and-done external market research agencies.
Great read! I especially liked the point about institutions reinforcing lock-in. I think games have long had the potential to become "forever hobbies" (similar to other media fandoms like Tolkien and Star Wars), but recent live service innovations and the CoD / sports games assembly lines have allowed developers to properly monetize and build systems to reinforce the lock-in.
I imagine meatsports went through a similar period of rapid development and lock-in, when the big 4 north american sports were institutionalized via MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA. Who knows what other local sports were played at the turn of the century that might have become an american staple, but failed to due to whatever chaotic butterfly effect processes are at play.
Unfortunately, I don't think breaking their stranglehold is easy or likely. That first developer "how to un-stick players" point seems like hopelessly wishful thinking:
> 1. A new game introduces an exciting new genre combination or a huge technical advance on the genre
I'm sure Supervive, Spectre Divide, Multiversus, and their ilk are praying that this is true, but all the evidence I've seen to date says it's not. Cricket never took off in NA, and Baseball never took off in India. (Pickleball is the rare exception here). It's not the game, it's the institutions that surround it.
This pretty much happens in all forms of gaming, way beyond videogames. Games that become successful enough eventually become cultures, and when they do then players are in for the long haul.
However I don’t think that means they’re all wrapped up forever as it’s also been the case for a long time, but never in totality. At a hazy estimate, I’d guess maybe a third of available players are locked in.
The more likely cause of liveops game difficulties, IMO, are that they are often not distinctive enough (they replicate metagame design from each other especially, which is fundamentally boring for players who already know those metagames). Secondly they often don’t come with a compelling story to the world of the game they’re pushing, which makes them sound kinda blah.
Liveops games for core gamers especially need to push both of these envelopes to capture interest.
There is a strange breed of gamers like me that exist that never played any of the live service games. We’re mostly hardcore Nintendo fans. We’ll sink hours into Mario and Zelda, etc. Zero interest at all in any of the games listed as sticky. I’m interested in seeing play styles and things I haven’t seen before. Not every Mario game changes things up, but there’s usually some fun surprises along the way. The last first person shooter I loved was Goldeneye on the N64.
As an entrenched FFXIV player, I can get behind this point.
It's true, I vacation on other games. The way I juggle it: I play FF14 in the 'background' of new release games. So its my go-to game if I have nothing to play.
What that means however, is that I'm less likely to just pick up a game for the sake of trying something new. I need to be sold before I play it. That's either through a combination of reviews, hype, or seeing that's it a game produced by a studio or developer that I already like. Word of mouth is also a huge factor. I've tried a lot of games on the recommendations of friends (Another Crab's Treasure is a good example from this year).
Has it narrowed what I play? Possibly. But, before FFXIV, I'd replay older games when I had a gap in new releases. That now just happens less.
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.