Ghosts of Tsushima may be the best Playstation game I have played EVER. It's a testament to how late in the console release cycle, developers are just now mastering internals. It's the ideal video game: open world, 13-century feudal Japan, Age of the Samurai. High contrast "Kurosawa" mode, 4K HDR is cinematically photoreal. I really hope it remains a Major IP for many years to come ;)
I just finished playing through Horizon Zero Dawn which had been untouched, collecting dust on the shelf for a couple years. Found more time in the pandemic and I'm wondering what else I've missed out on! The only other titles I've played with great acclaim are God of War and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
From a brief wiki search, it seems outside of Nintendo, studios only tend to have one-hit wonders. I never played the Infamous games, but will take you on your word on Ghosts of Tsushima.
- Witcher 3 brought me back to gaming after a 10+ year hiatus. While not perfect, it's the best/most immersive game I have ever played. Thanks to truly incredible writing, an interesting, engaging world where small side quests are some of the best content, good graphics that still hold up very well (especially with mods on PC, but just fine on console). All built on a foundation of very solid combat and gameplay.
- "Nier Automata" is an unusual experience that smoothly blends very different combat styles and has a mind-boggling, thought-provoking story.
Nier Automata is just something else. Not every part of the game is that well executed, but the music alone is worth the price of entry and the emotional payoff in the story makes me forgive the many clunky elements.
I'm so glad I gave it a chance, because battle androids in maid costumes was not something that got my attention for the right reasons. Skill Up's review on YouTube is what tipped me over the edge - he expressed he had many of the same concerns going in.
I'd say Witcher 2 is at least close, just smaller and less refined. The potion system is significantly more interesting in my opinion. That said, 3 is a masterpiece.
Even the original Witcher game is solid and has some interesting systems for its time. I wouldn't recommend it though to anyone who doesn't have an absurd amount of free time, or a real passion for the characters. It's been really neat watching CD Projekt step up their game, as it were, over the years.
Witcher 1 had some serious pacing issues, but I personally enjoyed it more than 2. 2 got too flash for me, whereas 1 was more about the characters and the story.
But it most DEFINITELY had pacing issues around the swamp area.
Witcher 2 is a good introduction to the state of the world in 3. You can read the books (or watch the whole series after it concludes), play 2 and understand the geopolitics of 3. It is also short, has a good but nearly-linear story (there are choices that significantly change your playthrough and outcomes, but when you play a second time taking the other road at every fork you've seen it all) and can be had for cheap. Oh, and it has a really touching story arc with the best love scene I've ever seen in any game.
Witcher 1 was a good game for its time, but unless you consider yourself a serious fan of the universe, I would recommend skipping. It's the only one in which Sapkowski was involved, it has some very good dialogues in random places and it's the only one which gives you a very good feel for what a "normal" Witcher's life is. But the voice acting is only good in Polish, up to the point it's recommended everyone use Polish audio with subtitles if they don't speak the language. And the plot is quite disconnected from the books -> Witcher 2 -> 3 line (I'm really bummed we never got closure on the plot of 1).
No, but you'd very possibly do yourself a disservice by skipping them.
Personally I prefer the first two games over the third in most respects, with notable exceptions for graphical polish and inventory management.
I watched the TV series first, and Witcher 3 has a much better and coherent story than the TV show even though the game picks up after the events of Witcher 1/2. I finished the game mostly for the stories.
Even having read all the material and played all the games, the show was pretty convoluted and confused me until near the end. The time jumps give little to no notice.
They could've very easily had text on the screen saying what time period the current scene was in. It seems like they left it out deliberately for artistic reasons and many people have been confused as a result.
It does stray quite far from the books though. Especially the angle on infertility is hilarious. In books the infertility was a side effect of hormonal imbalance caused by the use of magic. Impossible to recover from for males, nearly impossible for females. With how they changed it in the series, I wonder how are they going to explain all those important characters, Geralt included, being sons of sorceresses.
They could have very easily made the series a collection of short stories too, but they trued to tie them tigether in an incoherent way instead. Very poor attempt, in my opinion, and I often enjoy cheap TV shows.
I second the HZD recommendation – it's one of the best video games I've ever played. Funny thing is if I hadn't bought an HDR tv I'd probably never pick up the game, mechanized dinosaurs didn't really float my boat and I never saw a trailer or read the synopsis for the game. I bought it dirt cheap on sale only because it said it had HDR support and I wanted to see what difference it'd make in a game. Turns out it was stunningly gorgeous, great gameplay and a compelling story to boot!
I'm getting a PS5 this winter or next year, chiefly because of the Horizon Zero Dawn sequel – I desperately want to see where they take the story.
Metal Gear Solid 5 remains one of the most fun games I played this generation. The storyline is dumb even by MGS standards, but the gameplay is absolutely phenomenal. Every feature just clicks together.
It also manages to avoid, for the most part, the pitfalls open world games fall in to (huge spans to cross with nothing happening, fetch missions, collect missions etc).
Infiltrating and exfiltrating a compound, whichever way you can think of, in the Afghan desert with none of the fancy SONAR or gadgetry of other MGS titles is what the series has clearly wished it was since day one.
> Infiltrating and exfiltrating a compound, whichever way you can think of, in the Afghan desert with none of the fancy SONAR or gadgetry of other MGS titles is what the series has clearly wished it was since day one
That sounds exactly like “The Wild Geese”, the movie Kojima got the idea for stealth gameplay from: https://youtu.be/G0xy-XdMqS4
The games I enjoyed most over the past few years, in no particular order, are Red Dead Redemption 2, Spiderman, The Last of Us Remastered, Detroit Become Human, Bloodborne, Days Gone, Shadow of the Collossus remake. And in 2D, I loooooved Hollow Knight,
And of the ones already mentioned: God of War, The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima.
The Infamous games were ok. Not great, but not bad. Ghist of Tsushima is vastly better than their previous titles, IMHO.
If you're at all into 'platformers', I highly recommend Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Ori and the Blind Forest. These are some of the best in the genre and pretty cheap to boot.
The GoW games on a PS2(console, not emulated) are amazing, especially considering it's a 20 year old system. I still prefer them to the newer GoW on PS4.
Wow - I'm really sorry you've only been exposed to bad video games until now. It's a decent game but it doesn't even come close to the best game I've ever played.
I agree with the sentiment that video games back in the day were more elaborate in other ways that matter more than what is done today. Several good or promising franchises have also been totally ruined by becoming big.
As soon as it's making large amounts of money, it garners attention from the kind of people who don't really care about anything but making money. DLCs and all the other bad shit is because the people in power aren't the ones that are passionate about making great things.
As every other mainstream game for the last ten to fifteen years, give or take, it's just a forced course of action narratively illustrated by an interrupted sequence of dull cinematic scenes; the player just follows along with very limited space--if any--for exploration, decision-making, flexibility or creativity. The open world experience is ridiculously limited, as well. Does it look good? Sure! (Although every game uses the same game engines now, making them almost identical visually). But that's not the only thing that I expect from the format.
Let's be honest here: videogames aren't nearly as elaborate as many of them were just one or two decades ago, when many developers were having fun making them and putting in tons of effort without as many market constrictions and demands. Then you have, on the other hand, indie games, which tend to be just a glorified demo which uses technical limitations to its advantage, mainly aesthetically.
If somebody showed me how videogames would look when I was a kid, in 2000, twenty years in the future, I would have been incredibly disappointed. Besides them looking more immersive and VR being far more advanced, I'd have expected that the player had become an active participant, the effective subject of the game, instead of a passive spectator that just consooms whatever's put in front of them without any critical thought.
> very limited space--if any--for exploration, decision-making, flexibility or creativity
If that's your criteria, then I really think the last 10-15 years of gaming has seen more of that than the earlier decades. Minecraft, Kerball Space Program, Factorio, Subnautica, Stardew Valley and many more have become mega-hits even if they didn't originate in the mainstream. Their influence on the mainstream games (Fortnite) is undeniable and has forced gaming in better directions, particular towards exploration and creativity. I was a kid in 2000 as well and if you had shown me Minecraft then, I would have been head-over-heels. Sure, there's still on-rails shooters if you want them and a lot of games are "open world" ala Far Cry 3's map-of-checkboxes-to-tick and not "open world" ala Minecraft. But gaming as a whole gives way more options (even just among best-sellers) for creativity, expression, and exploration than ever before. We're in a golden age for the medium right now and if I could experience that through the same eyes I had growing up, I'd be awed.
> Let's be honest here: videogames aren't nearly as elaborate as many of them were just one or two decades ago, when many developers were having fun making them and putting in tons of effort without as many market constrictions and demands. Then you have, on the other hand, indie games, which tend to be just a glorified demo which uses technical limitations to its advantage, mainly aesthetically.
I'll agree with other commenters pointing out the wealth of amazing games that fit neither category you describe. Hollow Knight, for example, feels like a small team just went bananas offering a ridiculous amount of high quality content for a low price. I could name a whole bunch more that others haven't already. They're far from 'glorified demos that use technical limitations to their advantage'. Hollow Knight has been considered perhaps the best 'Metroidvania' by critics and fans alike.
Even a game like Celeste, which perhaps gets closer to being 'technically limited' and literally came from a demo game jam, is one of the best platformers I've played in my life.
The way I see it, your argument has some degree of merit insofar that the 'mainstream' of gaming got a ton bigger, more global, and more lucrative. This also happened to film and music.
But it's needlessly pessimistic to conclude that as a result there's less quality.
I'm a very picky gamer and since I don't make some artificial distinction between triple-A games and 'indie games', I could spend a hefty chunk of money on a monthly basis buying only the games I consider truly amazing. This has not been the case historically, at least in my experience.
> If somebody showed me how videogames would look when I was a kid, in 2000, twenty years in the future, I would have been incredibly disappointed.
I highly doubt it.
the witcher 2, GTA5, factorio, DOTA2, Rust. I would have dreamed to play anoy of those. You can even watch DOTA2 like its a football game with pro commentators and incredible money on the line.
Your critique of some of these bigger titles and studios is not wrong, but you are generalizing it into a farce of the modern gaming world.
Did you consider perhaps you changed, and don't have the same wonder and ability to immerse yourself in games as you did 20 years ago.
Exactly. Popular video games today are purposefully engineered products made to maximize addiction and play time with decisions being made based almost entirely on how to maximizing profit for shareholders. It's sad.
Incidentally I've been finding much more enjoyment in indie games the past few years, because these tend to be made by people who aren't doing so to become rich(though I suppose they wouldn't mind that happening along the way).
Same, but it's because Indie developers have to make trade-offs and those trade-offs result in more interesting games even if they're not as polished.
One of the reasons I was excited for VR is because I was hoping it would turn into the wild west again like it was back in the NES/SNES days where people where experimenting. You'd play a game where some stuff worked and some stuff didn't, but you appreciated the entertainment regardless.
Nowadays it's all so engineered and samey that I often find it more difficult to finish AAA games than indie games.
I liken AAA games to porn.They put a little bit of everything in there to try and appeal to as wide an audience as they can.
Back in the day, exploring the game itself and its systems used to be part of the appeal. Nowadays developers are scared to death that a player might make a decision that locks them out of content.
I think your judgement is clouded by fond memories you acquired in your youth. A child can get utterly fascinated by the most mundane things.
My subjectively positive experience of video games already declined, right around when yours peaked, even though by pretty much any standard, these newer games were better than the ones that came before them.
What? That's a wrong assumption on your part. No, you are characterizing my experiences with video games as a kid arbitrarily to support your own argument, which is--I think--just a fallacy: "the world's always been the same, it's you what's changed and you are just referencing fond but ultimately biased memories". I expected more from video games when I was a little kid, that's the whole point of my comment, so I didn't glorify them, even as a kid, to the point of having my judgement significantly clouded.
Same thing when people criticise heavy smartphone usage, for instance: "well, people watched more TV then; it's always been the same. You miss being young". You couldn't take your TV virtually everywhere, so the extent to which people distracted themselves and neglected their lives was less.
>by pretty much any standard, these newer games were better than the ones that came before them.
Watch this (or almost any other video from crowbcat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWVtZJo-HqI. This is the tendency in video games: less resources, less elaboration; higher prices for the whole game (DLCs, Season Pass, etc.). As with anything, it's "reduce the costs, increase the benefits", as well as "make it more addictive", even at the expense of the product's quality.
I think this video largely supports the point. As someone who's played very little GTA, I don't understand what the video's trying to communicate - the only big difference I'm seeing is the higher resolution in GTA V clips.
> I don't understand what the video's trying to communicate - the only big difference I'm seeing is the higher resolution in GTA V clips.
I'm afraid it's as clear as day, but anyhow, you have it on the video's description: "Physics, gunfight, AI, melee combat, controls, interiors, multiplayer freedom". In GTA IV, almost everything looks more elaborate and polished, and it came out five years before the franchise's next instance.
I'm similarly unable to understand how this video shows Gears 5 isn't "brutal, grounded and satisfying".
It really seems like the same phenomenon I experienced with the latest first generation Pokemon remake. It has more resources, immersion, and engagement than the original releases in 1996 by any objective standard - but it feels less engaging, in some nonspecific way I've never been able to communicate to anyone didn't play the originals.
I played it after Last of Us 2 and it just doesn't compare, especially in terms of mechanics and visuals. If there's one last game to play on PS4 it's Last of Us 2.
I didn't find either of them super compelling. I never really bought into the characters so to me they were both mostly mediocre action games that tried way too hard. They weren't terrible, but I didn't agree with the hype.
I got excited when I saw this - I don't game much but my son is obsessed with samurai and would love this. However, I think it's a bit violent for him - anything similar you could recommend for a 13y/o?
You're deluding yourself if you think your 13 year old isn't consuming much worse than video game violence on a daily basis. Just let him play the game.
Yep, and then enjoy all the other amazing exclusives: the last of us one/two, drakes uncharted, god of war, horizon zero (pc did just release but is buggy), ratchet and clank,
I wouldn't be surprised if console revisions/upgrades begin coming out with even more frequency. There was only a 3.5 year gap between the PS4 and PS4 Pro. Only a 2 year gap between the Nintendo Switch and the revision with vastly improved battery life (not as big a deal as PS4 to PS4 Pro, but still a big deal for anyone who uses their switch on the go).
Personally I think I'm going to wait until the PS5 releases and then see if I can find a secondhand PS4 pro at a good price.
Gameplay, creative backstory, unique multiplayer + PVP, and countless other aspects place Dark Souls at the top of the list for me, and that’s not limited to Ps4 but all platforms.
My great grandmother used to play solitaire. The same way that many of us while away the night staring at a screen, she'd sit in her apartment wearing the spots off a pack of cards. Some oldsters will react to this news with dismay, but as I see it, our lives are richer for the innovation.
I still do play solitaire. I taught a few variations to my kids early on when the pandemic locked us at home. I don't judge either style of game as better or worse than the other... just different. Video games are clearly richer games, but the conversations I had with my family growing up were often while sitting around a table playing card games.
I don't know, if you include Magic the Gathering in the card games pile it's definitely competitive on the "richness"[0] spectrum against most video games.
Though in the current apocalypse, there's been an uptick in video game forms of Magic, and even a sharp rise in people playing over the internet by pointing a webcam at their table.
[0]: Pun not intended, but it's undeniably also expensive...
Several versions of traditional solitaire are extremely deep games when you try and maximize your odds of winning. Video games can be mindless or mind bending puzzles.
Which is why I think lumping all video games into a single category is meaningless. Beat Saber and Minecraft have little in common.
Missing the point. Minecraft started as a creative style game that hit massive popularity in all age groups, and encouraged players to build to their heart's content without much of a goal. It didn't start in VR as well.
Beat Sabor is one of the first "killer app" VR games, with a clear goal with emphasis on reaction time and immersion using the VR tech behind it.
Both are played very differently, the former a game you come back to to refine your work over and over in a creative way, the other using reaction time to score better.
Having never heard of Beat Sabor, this made me think it sounds like Guitar Hero. YouTube confirms. I really did not ever get the appeal of GH, but BS looks pretty fun.
I feel like there's so many games that can be VR-ified like this. Even if it's just a first person, point to a square on the floor and click, sort of game, I feel like more innovation can build on top of traditional games like minesweeper starting with that.
What's amazing is that solitaire isn't a single game with a set rules. It's an entire category of card games. The "game developers" of the past were just people agreeing on a set of rules.
I know how it came to be. Doesn't change my mind about it being garbage game. In fact, its popularity is rather my point. Not that garbage computer games aren't being made today, but the choice out there is incredible. Also popular among her generation: the 15 puzzle. Blech.
Speed solving the 15 puzzle is actually quite fun :) I have a few nice physical versions at home, although nothing really compares to the crazy speed I've seen people achieving on computer versions.
Then again, speedcubing (Rubik's cube) is my "main" hobby, and it's a lot deeper and more interesting IMO.
Spider solitaire is my jam. I played it every day of my commute on my phone for a year. Still go back to it sometimes. Definitely need to try other kinds.
> Analysts point out that almost half of the accounted three billion are those who play only on smartphones or mobile devices. This segment is also ahead of all others in terms of growth.
This segment is incredibly lucrative for the winners. Niantic has an estimated revenue of 800 million dollars. Supercell's highest reported revenue was just over 2 billion euros. King sold to Activision Blizzard for 5.9 billion dollars in 2016. Epic is going to war with Google and Apple over Fornite money. There's Asian players that are also impressive, but I'm not familiar enough to speak on that market. These revenues and valuations are happening in a high growth market.
It is so very depressing. Nearly every game released by those companies is an ad riddled garbage fire.
It's an affront to what makes gaming fun. They are "games" in the same sense that slot machines are "games". They aren't games in the sense that non-mobile gamers talk about.
> Nearly every game released by those companies is an ad riddled garbage fire.
Say what you will about Fortnite, but it's definitely not an "ad riddled garbage fire". They do advertise their store offerings in the lobby, albeit in a pretty unobtrusive way. The game has essentially become a PvP Grand Theft Auto, and it's executed remarkably well. On top of that, it's free to play and has absolutely no play-to-win mechanics. All purchases are purely cosmetic.
It might not be your bag, but I find this characterization of at least one game developed by a studio mentioned above to be completely inaccurate.
I enjoy Fortnite, play it with some old colleagues most weekends. It's simple, cross platform for all of us, been around and not going away, and has several modes to mix things up with. Barrier to entry is $0 allowing any of use to play as casually as we'd like without needing to make an investment. That last point is what should hint the game is going to be pushing sales heavily.
When you launch the game you get full screen ads for newly released skins you have to click past to acknowledge, entire seasons are designed and themed around marketing deals with cinematics of the new stuff and click through walkthroughs about season skins you can by. If you don't have the battle pass there is constant advertising to get it and when you do it provides enough free virtual currency to run you through the virtual store at least a couple times per year so buying the cosmetics feels familiar.
So you have heavy 3rd party ads (as mentioned next season is going to be all Marvel) and heavy first part ads (in game store purchases) every time you launch the game, join a match, participate in a match, finish a match, or leave a party. Just because the ads are integrated doesn't mean it's not an ad riddled garbage fire.
But overall it's a decent enough game that lets me interact with some folks who otherwise wouldn't play something so I like it. I'm just aware I'm being served ads constantly in it.
To note, pachinko are a widely installed business in their country.
Same as medal games in game centers, there has always been a need for super simple, mindless “games”, with or without money exchanging hand at some point.
At least those games don't take over your complete life the way big online games. And don't lead to those playing often overnight, am addicted, am sleep deprived raging gamer situations.
I know farmville, candy crush and the like playing people. I also know AAA online pubg, world of warcraft etc games playing people. The worst behavior I have seen definitely did not came from farmville candy crush crowd.
Also, overall, steam sales seems to cost way more money I have ever seen being spent on games. And not just that, spending a lot of money on steam sales is point of pride for gamers - who ten turn around and act all superior over causual player ... spending less money (or no money) overall.
> Raging behavior? Mood is definitively effected, especially when the social aspect has a negative turn.
Rage and affected mood are two different things. But again, the level of anger or irritability in relation with farmville are super mild compared to what I have seen in pc/console gamers.
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The most irritable to me is the level of hypocrisy pc/console gamers display when they complain about causual games.
Personally I have observed a person with worse farmville addiction than any pc related addiction I have personally seen. Two accounts on farmville, one on a farmville-clone, each three played at the same time competitive for top ranking, with guilds and guild drama, and candy-crush games on the side.
If we are talking about spending, thankfully the above person did at least restrict themselves to <$100 per months on boosters (or at least that what they told me), but you should be aware that in-store revenue outnumber sales revenue in basically ever game regardless if its on phone or pc (not sure about console but my guess is that the same is true). There is a reason why almost every game company has shifted focus away from game sales and into in-game item sales.
> Rage and affected mood are two different things.
No. Mood swings because of a game is the same regardless if its short bursts or long and moody. If a person allow a game (and the social groups in it) to have lasting negative effect on their mood then that is a problem regardless what kind of game it is.
Rage as in yelling, hitting table with fist, swearing, throwing cell phone accross the room because someone called and he lost match on pc. It is absolutely different then "mood swing" which is used for range of things including mild irritability.
The people I had observed having issues basically played to the point of failing school classes due to chronic sleep deprivation, had atrocious performance in work post gaming session (he talked about playi by game till morning openly) or basically checked out of family life entirely making partner basically single. Let's say that formely gaming friendly wife build up huge aversion toward games.
I knew multiple of these and none of them played farmvile nor anything like that.
I believe people like your friend exist, the farmville top cant be composed of people having healthy relationships and jobs. But they are not around me. Around me the worst were among pc/console players, usually people who self identified as gamers and took it as point of pride.
Maybe rage is a symptom of poorly management of stress and negative emotions? Cars do not cause road rage. People who throw childish temper tantrums is not controlled by the activity, be that driving, gameing, cooking, gambling, fishing, cleaning, sports, constructing, knitting, (so far all places where I have seen rage) or what have you. Childish temper tantrums occurs in all places where people are, and especially places where people who struggle emotionally may go to, and where they might be stressed or be impacted by a negative event.
Just a single game, Fate/Grand Order, has grossed ~3 $billion, and that was as of last year. I'm sure it's much higher now. The amount of money spent by players in mobile makes everything else look like peanuts by comparison.
Entertainment. No more, no less. You'd be surprised by how many of the asian F2P games are completely playable without spending a dime- yet people do anyway.
So I have moved on to another game that is less money intensive and less time-intensive (can be seen as a good or a bad thing).
What strikes me most is how compelling this material is to command my attention. It's like being under a spell.
They are great at taking money, but even for f2p they are just psychologically optimized to command our attention (which is a bigger concern in depth and breadth of impact).
Can't wait for the future strategies of addiction we can see in the next gen games :D
I’ve played two gatcha games in succession and this describes the thing very well. I wasn’t missing a single of play, spend a little money on them, read news and game info everyday. I’m glad I stopped. Some PC games can attract my attention for hours or days on, but they are not a daily burden, and also more satisfying to play.
> "A few hundred dollars? What does that buy you?"
Let's just say that the majority of characters in Fate/Grand Order and other Asian gacha games that one can roll for are young and female for a reason...
It varies, like. Most mobile games are pretty crap, but you have people like Supercell who make good mobile games - I don't like their games, but lots and lots of people do.
And to be fair, most "actual" games are pretty crap too.
And trailers and reviews were famously broken for console/PC games historically.
Pretty much every product sold in our society has its' design shaped by the need to make money (i.e capitalism).
I'm not sure why you're singling out F2P games here specifically, relative to all the other half-baked crap designed to make a profit.
At least hundreds of millions of people daily get value out of playing free games without spending a cent. Consider the fact that all console/PC gamers have spent money on the game up-front, whereas a very small proportion of people on mobile pay for all of the rest.
Like, I don't enjoy games with micro-transactions, but clearly lots of other people do. Who am I to judge their fun?
> get value out of playing free games without spending a cent.
Mindlessly grind medallions or whatever. The problem with IAP games (free or not, afaik a Dead Space game was selling ingame crafting materials as IAPs) is they waste your most precious resource: time.
> And trailers and reviews were famously broken for console/PC games historically.
Oh but that's easy. Don't preorder and don't buy games based on just one review. Especially don't buy games based on the developer's trailers :)
I note that my core point, that you can't legislate other people's fun, is not tackled in your response.
Like, I mostly agree with you on the quality of many (maybe most) F2P games, but FIFA wastes your time far more than Candy Crush (and indeed, the people who buy sports games every year seem very strange to me).
I think's that number is reasonable considering any PC can be used for gaming with a small investment. Just adding a $100-$150 GPU can make any old PC from the last decade capable of playing games. That's how gaming has usually worked in third world countries at least.
And people usually already have pc for activities outside of gaming. And it's very easy to play any games on pc, and some are free such as open source games and abandonwares (CMIIW).
A quick google says there are 1.5 billion pcs in the world (in 2015). I’m guessing they’re pretty much assuming most people who have a PC have played some form of game on it.
It's pretty striking, sure.
But depending on how they made the investigation, possibly it includes gaming down to being able to answer yes to questions like 'Have you more than a handful of times opened and used Microsoft Solitaire?', which is of course not what most people think of a PC gaming these days.
This is a trend that will continue to accelerate. And I think we grossly underestimated how much time and money people are willing to spend on video games. Although, I think production has somewhat plateau’d in the past five years. There’s VR, but I believe there will be a new category introduced within the next five years that will change the gaming landscape.
> There’s VR, but I believe there will be a new category introduced within the next five years that will change the gaming landscape.
I have been dreaming of better interfaces (controllers) for games for decades. The Wii, despite it's limited power, was a huge leap forward in how we played games. Unfortunately Nintendo is the only gaming company taking risks while Microsoft and Sony keep doubling down on graphics with the same controllers from 30 years ago. If someone made a non-VR console with VR-style controllers it would be a huge leap. Instead we keep getting the same old immersion-killing 4-button-mashing consoles and games with upgraded graphics cards.
> Unfortunately Nintendo is the only gaming company taking risks while Microsoft and Sony keep doubling down on graphics with the same controllers from 30 years ago.
Because they work and they're what people want. Xbox and Playstation both tried their own motion controls and they flopped, and thank god they did. Many of us like controllers and don't want people trying to innovate that away.
Keep in mind that 1/3 of the population suffer from motion sickness, so for them (I'm in this group) VR isn't an option for the most part.
Of course if this is a solvable problem - those who otherwise suffer from motion sickness are symptom-free in any VR application - then I agree VR could have a bright future.
I get quite motion-sick. Boat rides are - at best - mildly unpleasant.
After trying the oculus dk1 roller coaster demo, I was incapable of doing anything for 4-5 hours and still felt sick days later.
I play beat saber regularly; taking off the vive after an hour I feel mildly disoriented for about half a minute and then I am fine. The tech has progressed tremendously and no longer gives me any trouble (which may not hold true for everyone but it’s definitely been fine for me)!
A big part of it is does your ingame motion match your real world motion. In games like Beat Saber the only movements are from you physically moving. I've had a VR headset for maybe 4 years now and can still only play racing games for about an hour before motion sickness starts to settle in. I bet the roller coaster demo would be much less disorienting if one sat in a motion simulator. I'd love to own one eventually for my sim-racing setup.
Wouldn't generalize this; I think there are also factors like game performance (FPS) that are at play. I can play Beat Saber and HL:Alyx just fine on the Vive without any issues whatsoever, but whenever I want to give 'Blade & Sorcery' another try I feel absolutely terrible after a few minutes of gameplay. I do think it's poor performance (low FPS and 'location stutter' where the game seemingly can't decide where to place me exactly) are the cause, but I could not place a finger on when/where exactly the threshold is where I start to feel sick.
Yeah - performance is an issue here (I've worked on VR tech before). What I'm suggesting isn't that developers are getting it perfect, but that we have technologies and techniques that make it work at scale (without people being sick).
I'm getting into boat-sailing, and I'm saddened by the nausea it causes. I'm looking into ways to reduce this, and I'm thinking ways to deal with motion sickness incurred in VR-games is probably applicable to me.
Nausea at sea is definitely something that typically goes away at least after a couple of days at sea. You get "sea legs". But if you're having it more as a now and then hobby I'm not sure but I recon that there's a long term training element in it as well.
Interestingly, it's the same when you go into space. Around half the people experience it and there doesn't seem to be a link between people who get motion sick and those who get space sick. Symptoms can be mild to relatively severe but people tend to adjust after a few days.
Controllers were quite different 30 years ago. Dual stick didn’t become the norm until 20 years ago, though arguably Xbox and PlayStation controllers haven’t changed their layouts much since 2000.
Yes, and the very few games that really tried to make use of the interface were amazing. Zelda Skyward Sword was incredibly fun. I remember slashing around thinking there was no way we were going back to regular controls from then on, but I was wrong. I think we have invested so much in the current controller layout that it's difficult for new ideas to get off the ground.
Ironic you mentioned that game is being the Pinnacle of motion controls, I'm fond of Wii sports resort instead, that zelda game made me wish they had GameCube controller support because it was so inaccurate.
So long as FPS remains the most popular genre in console gaming nobody is going to deviate from existing controller designs, they are ideally suited for shooters.
For shooters, maybe, but for _First Person_ Shooters? I love gamepads for 3rd person games, but a mouse + keyboard is by far superior to console controllers for FPS. And I say this as someone who plays mostly on consoles! A mouse gives more control and precision than what a thumbstick can provide.
I'm more skeptical. VR will remain a niche, and future games will feature improved graphics. The new haptic feedback on the PS5 controller will add a minor feature. Other than that, games will remain the same on the fundamentals. Couch co-op may make a comeback.
I'm extremely skeptical as well, but the fact that Facebook, Apple, and Google are all dumping tons of money to develop some form of it makes me convinced that its an upcoming market that has the potential to hit big time.
Half the stuff I see people do online goes against any logic I ever thought people would do. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes off for something completely out of left field. Like what is the weirdest, dumbest thing you could think of doing with vr technology, for example - watching 2d movies with your friends, or playing minesweeper, and I bet that's going to be the thing that makes it hit big.
> but the fact that Facebook, Apple, and Google are all dumping tons of money to develop some form of it makes me convinced that its an upcoming market that has the potential to hit big time.
Eh, I'd be cautious. Remember the late 90s, when the day when you'd primarily control your computer by talking to it was imminent? Or (also in the late 90s) when PDAs were going to take over the world? Or that thing where you'd have documents embedded in other documents and no applications as such? Or... tech has a lot of fads, is all I'm saying, and often significant resources are spent on them. Some of them go somewhere. Some eventually emerge in a massively different form (PDA -> smartphone). Some just die, though.
> but the fact that Facebook, Apple, and Google are all dumping tons of money to develop some form of it makes me convinced that its an upcoming market that has the potential to hit big time.
Except that this belies the politics of BigCos. The BigCos are throwing money at it because a) everybody else is doing it, and nobody wants to get left behind, so it's a good bet for executives to fund b) it's a shiny new thing, so it's an interesting project that will get adoption internally from people at the lower levels who will be eager to transfer to and work on the project.
Neither of those have anything to do with whether or not there's actually a sizable market for it, but we won't know whether a market will appear for it as the market potential is nearly entirely dependent upon execution (i.e. early VR didn't sell well due to low resolution, motion sickness from low refresh rates, lack of a killer app, etc.).
It's pretty easy to throw money at projects. Coming up with something that's good enough to sell at mass-market volumes is an entirely different question.
This. Local multiplayer has been severely lacking from games since networking got really fast. Most people of my generation who grew up playing things like GoldenEye and Halo locally would buy anything that gave even minimal service to this niche.
My buddy and I stayed up til 2am the other week co-opping "Wild Guns" on his Super NT. Totally out of left field and something I never would have cared for when I had an SNES.
Everyone I know plays something: DoTA, candy crush, Codenames, Jackbox, online cards, Skyrim, Zelda, Witcher, DnD on Foundry, even my old relatives play various games on mobile and iPad. Whereas, the younger, especially male, people I know almost all have a gaming system of one kind or another.
I am very into Starcraft myself. It is a wonderful combination of speed, strategy, economics, deception, and accuracy.
Most of the friends I have don't play video games. There are both bubbles where everybody plays as well as bubbles where playing video games as an adult is a very foreign concept.
I discovered starcraft2 when it became free to play. I find addictive in a similar way to my LoL days, without the toxic teammates.
It's super fun and engrossing, but I have to admit I occasionally get flashes of worry about is this how I want to spend my time? To be fair, I get the same thoughts about my job.
I think the greatest video game to be played is life. Unfortunately not many people can afford to play it the fun way and things start to get boring and time start to fly by and people get drawn into simulations of some subset of it, which begs the question, shouldn’t life simply be a “simulation” of some subset of something?
What is interesting is that an affirmative to this question often makes life more “game-like” and in terms more open to the notion of it capable of being “fun to play” (and vice versa). Though once again not many people would wholeheartedly appreciate this Insight. Very unfortunately life is often filled with suffering and miseries and most (including myself) would often get blinded and overlook the nice things, as well as its game-like nature.
Perhaps getting into one of these man-made simulators is not that bad of a thing, especially if it engages the social module and in some way enriches the overall gameplay of life.
I think many progresses in science & technologies are often hindered by our tendencies to not appreciate games. As a (post)modern civilisation we often take things too seriously. Probably a feature not a bug! But on a more individual level I think taking things more lightly (while still being a responsible human being) would improve the overall quality of life. That is something I’m still trying to learn.
I am trying to be less serious as well. It's easy to fall into the trap of be highly critical, highly methodical and just overall taking everything at serious face value, but where is the joy in that?
As someone who doesn't play any games at all and looking for a new hobby, would you recommend picking this up as one? if so, which platform/games would you recommend? (something light/fun)
some background:
I'm 45, I don't think I can handle anything too intense (even watching TV gets my heart pounding, I get too immersed and don't exactly enjoy too much adrenaline); I used to enjoy the Atari console in the 80s and then later played games on my Apple IIc and then PC, up to around year 2000 or so. Now I own an iPhone SE and Macbook air 2015, so nothing too powerful. I don't have a TV (but a decent computer screen).
EDIT: so many great suggestions for things I didn't know existed. Thank you so much!
There are tons of non-intense video games! It's not all shooters, thankfully. Especially building/management style games, turn-based games, and role-playing games can be calm.
I've heard good things about Factorio. If you want to dip your toes into first person games you should try the Portal series, which has a bit more action but not too much imo.
Get an Apple Arcade sub for $5 / month (cancel any time) and try things. It's like Netflix but for games, and your SE will be able to handle many of them.
I'm not a fan of mobile games in general but Apple Arcade games have no micro-transactions as a rule and they curated by Apple, which means they are generally very polished.
I can recommend Grindstone in particular, but with the service being like Netflix, you can try just about every game; I'm sure some things will catch your eye.
For your Mac and given your preferences I can recommend Sim City 4, and indie classics like Bastion, Braid and Fez; the latter two will probably challenge your preconceptions about video games.
I'd recommend maybe some strategy games that are turn based or slow in general. Here are my 2 current favorites, they both run well on a Mac.
Civilization 6 is a turn based, hexagon grid, strategy game where you build an empire from the ancient era, researching pottery and animal husbandry, an so on, all the way to the future with satellites and rockets and war robots.
It's all turn based, so it's not particularly intense, however it can be infuriating (usually in a good way) when another civ nukes you because you wouldn't trade with them.
Cities Skylines a city builder. (The most famous game in this genre would be SimCity which is also great fun but can feel quite dated nowadays.) You can either play it traditionally, managing your city budget, revenue, taxes, milestones as your small town grows into a metropolis. Or you can play in a sandbox mode where money and all supplies are infinite and you're mostly dealing with infrastructure and zoning.
Note, while they both run well on a Mac, Cities Skylines can get very laggy when your city reaches the hundreds of thousands of citizens.
I can also second the suggestion for chess, or maybe digital versions of other board games.
Some things are up to personal taste, like the graphics and art style. I definitely prefer how Civ 5 looks.
There's also the fact that Civ 5 was primarily designed and developed as a desktop PC game, while Civ 6 was designed as cross-platform (desktop, tablets, consoles, and smartphones). Some people will prefer that too, though.
But there are major differences that aren't up for discussion:
Civ5 has better mods because Firaxis exposed/released APIs that give modders more control/access than Civ6 provides. This means more & better mods.
VP has better AI than Civ 6. I think it has some of the best AI in the history of gaming.
VP has better balancing, for both civs/leaders and tech/social.
VP has an active developer who releases frequently and listens to community feedback. More importantly, VP's developer primarily cares about making the game fun. Firaxis primarily cares about squeezing money out of customers through expansions and DLC.
I really regret buying Civ6. I even got suckered twice with the expansions, thinking they would at least lead to modders bringing the game up to par. Nope.
I have 1000 hours in Civ 5 (mostly Vox Populi), and ~100 in Civ 6. Those hours in Civ6 have been in 5-hour bouts of me trying to enjoy the game, then giving up because it feels so bad to play.
I wish Firaxis would just hire the guy behind VP and put him in charge of the series.
It seems like, 10-20 years ago I could reliably look forward to the next installment to the franchise to give me more of what I want, or at least be decent. Lately I realized how almost the opposite is true, that the longer a game series goes on the less innovative it is, the more bloated, less joyful.
If you want a new hobby and not a new time drain I recommend installing https://openemu.org/ on your Air and download some roms. Watch some videos on YouTube going through the best roms for SNES and NeoGeo. So many nice games from that era you can just fire up and play for 30 minutes and have a great time. I find that many modern games require hours and hours to give something back.
Try Portal and Portal 2. The series is really friendly for begginers, and it has one of the best stories and writing in video games. If you never played a first person game, it might take some time to get used to the controls, but Portal is perfect for it - you can play as slow as you want.
There is always this disconnect when I read stuff like this
3 billion people is 30% or of 3 people. Ok, we go on OkCupid, we find the question "Do you enjoy playing video games" and we set that as a criteria for matches. Your matches will drop to > 1% of the population, at least as a male looking for female.
Checking another dating site that has things people like. The site claims 10 million users, only 200k have selected "like games" or 2%, vastly different than the article's claimed 30%
I get some of the reasons for the difference like not considering yourself a gamer yet plays Covet Fashion an hour a day.
Still, in daily life the number of people I meet who would claim to like games in any form doesn't match that 30% number.
Likely because they count mobile games in these figures but people don't count them when talking about gaming on a dating profile.
Virtually everyone you know probably tried Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, or flappy bird. Most of them probably have at least one game like that installed on their phone today that they play on the toilet or whatever. But they don't consider themselves gamers.
My 75 years old mother plays bubble shooters, dots & other games of that sort probably as much or more than I play any games - and I'm a game developer.
She wouldn't consider herself a gamer. I wouldn't in the sense that it's not an identity for her (I wouldn't say "gamer" = player just like a film buff isn't "someone that watches a lot of TV").
Like she wouldn't buy a "gaming chair" or any other gamer-branded/oriented merch nor are the games something she talks about much.
Words only have meaning because of the way people use them. See how the meaning of "literally" has changed in the last decade for an example.
To most people the term gamer does not precisely mean "one who plays games." The type of games and immersion in gaming culture are factors that people consider when labeling themselves and others "gamers."
The bit many people are not realizing is that e-sports will overtake current sports within the next few decades.
For now, e-sports is at that sweet spot of good production value and a reasonable amount of advertising. I predict we'll be back to sitting through 3-5 minutes of commercials for every 15 minutes of gameplay within the next decade as advertisers realize how willing gamers are to spend money on virtual stuff.
There will be too much competition from "casts". While the top 1% can be seen between commercials, the top 5% are cast on Twitch, commercial free, by a sole caster surviving on Twitch and Patreon. The level of competition will be very similar, possibly with more variety in the top 5%.
I remember being a college freshman in 2001 and playing PC games, namely Rogue Spear and Counter-Strike online with friends in my dorm room. I talked with them on a headset with a microphone using Roger Wilco and Battlecom. A lot of the guys I lived with in the dorm thought it was really weird that I talked to people online playing video games. Some would make fun of me.
Then Halo came out in November, and in the spring semester, when everyone returned to school after the holidays, and a lot of people had new XBoxes with Halo, nobody thought it was weird anymore. Almost overnight, online video games became normalized, at least to college age dudes.
Even so, society still stereotype video games and video gamers as juvenile and waste of time.
This is apparent especially in dating circles, where more often than not, listing video games as hobby for a males is a negative signal to the opposite sex.
> This is apparent especially in dating circles, where more often than not, listing video games as hobby for a males is a negative signal to the opposite sex.
This is almost certainly because of the small portion of men who see "video games" as a personality rather than a hobby and are probably quite strongly responsible for society's view on "gamers" too.
It is quite ridiculous since scrolling through social media and texting endlessly, spending hours on youtube or netflix, gossiping for hours, or playing the dating game (notice I said dating game, not dating) are an equal waste of time. There's a point where any activity becomes an obsession and that's when it becomes a problem.
If you aren't obsessing and are otherwise stable (no debt, bills are paid, job, housing), then it doesn't matter what others say about them. We could be doing something more productive than arguing on HackerNews, yet here we are. Life isn't about being productive 100% of our lives since nothing really does matter anyway.
In a thousand, million or billion years, most (if not all of us) will be forgotten.
The issue is that very often video games are addicitive and you are very likely to neglect everyone including yourself to feed that addiction. It's pretty much like a gambling addiction. Now I wonder why it's a negative on dating circles...
I think he means waste as in "doing something that carries no real benefit to yourself", and if that's the case then you're probably grinding instead of actually enjoying a game.
FF VII teaches you real values. LoL teaches you absolutely nothing besides resilience when getting bashed for going 0/1
> listing video games as hobby for a males is a negative signal to the opposite sex
Maybe those girls make own observations on the behavioral difference between a guy who takes gaming as an identity and lists it as important vs guy who sometimes plays games.
perhaps it's "wasting time" that is considered "juvenile" and just because more people have enough time to waste some of it doesn't make playing games any more "adult".
I have nothing against games, it's no better or worse than any other hobby or time-killing activity. It's just stunning that so many people are so busy and yet have so much free time.
actually, it kind of does.
Technically, watching TV is a waste of time as well. But watching the latest show, i.e. Game of thrones, office, etc. Is not considered a waste of time, society almost sees it as a requirement.
I never seen office and it never mattered. Majority of people I know never seen Game of Thrones and would not liked it. Some people do like Game of thrones. So no, it is definitely not a requirement by "society". It may be requirement in your own bubble of society, just as some other bubbles treat dota or Witcher III as requirement.
I also cant recall people defending TV watching as not-a-wasted-of-time. There seems to be consensus that it is waste of time. That if you spent whole weekend by watching tv or watched tv till late hours, you should get a grip and self control.
This doesn't surprise me at all, I spend 5x times more money on video games per year than dev education and I don't even game that much, maybe once a month. Video game markets just gonna keep getting bigger.
I talked to an executive at Skillz a few years ago and she told me that one of their main growth strategies was actually to target prospective women that could be gamers. The way it worked was that a few of Skillz executives were in this market, women who loved video gaming but businesses at the time refused to recognize it.
Imagine a woman who plays mobile games just to kill time at the bus stop, etc. Exec told me that she had friends like this and she has really easily gotten them to adopt all sorts of gaming and knew how easy it was to do this.
So when they looked at it like that, the market for people who were ignored was massive and that's one of the reasons why they grew so fast.
I think another underserved video game niche is our elderly... but maybe that's a separate discussion
So, back in the day I worked with a lot of gaming companies on their advertising. They would point blank refuse to target women because "women don't play games". Even when we demonstrated that women made up a really sizable proportion of their audience, they wouldn't budge.
Really brought it home to me that so much bias is reproduced through the biases of advertisers, rather than the platforms.
I see we have similar taste, might I recommend assasin's creed? Amazing graphics and the story mode is pretty phenomenal, kind of a greek mythology nerd so that's why I'm so drawn to it.
In normal times I would travel to Greece multiple times a year. I acquired a 4k projector so I could fill a wall with the game. It’s been a nice substitute.
If a game is going to support Windows + macOS than it isn't much more work to also support Linux these days. There are many games released on Linux every year.
Beyond that, most game devs today use established engines like Unity or Unreal, which typically have one-click build buttons for all major platforms. The level of abstraction has been raised, which affects not only game logic but even things like graphics APIs (DirectX vs Vulkan vs Metal) and packaging (installer, icons, etc). The bar has never been lower to throw in Linux support, even if you don't expect a huge market.
I've seen it argued that releasing a Linux version (even using Unity/Unreal) is worse than releasing a Windows version that runs on Proton, because the Windows API is stabler and the Linux version will inevitably bitrot without continual updates.
Proton is good, but in no measure 'better'. Linux isn't as unstable as everyone makes it out to be. Quite the opposite. Proton still has to work on linux, afterall. If Linux support bitrots quickly, then so does everyone dependent on proton.
While Linux might not be as unstable as everyone makes it out to be, your argument doesn’t support that at all. The point is Valve maintains Proton so that everyone and their mum doesn’t need to maintain their own Linux fork that’ll bitrot. Without an entity maintaining Proton it could stop working in a few months for all we know.
I for one knew how to deploy Linux applications long before Docker but know nothing about the GPU/graphics stack on Linux which is crucial to game devs, and FWIW I ran into graphics problems when I tried Ubuntu Desktop (yeah, just the vanilla Desktop, not gaming) on my Nvidia GPU last year, so again your snarky response contains no relevant info at all.
Yes absolutely. Proton is a great product. But underneath, it's still Linux. So saying 'Linux support is terrible, Proton is better' makes absolutely zero sense.
Lots. I only game on linux, i've got more games on my steam library than I have time to play and plenty on my wishlist, both released and forthcoming.
I don't tend to play the large AAA type games though, I don't know how well those work if that's your thing, but I find them to usually be more style than substance anyway.
I would check out game streaming services if you have decent internet. I’ve been playing on Google Stadia over the last few months, and it’s rekindled my love for gaming after years of not being able to play the latest games on my Mac. The age of hardware not being the limiting factor in your selection of games is close upon us.
Every game I've tried so far works either out of the box with Steam's Proton (even ones without official linux support) or through Lutris, or requires you to tweak a config file which you can find by googling. Some have minor glitches but nothing gamebreaking.
Depend what game you like to play, I think. (I play some games that are DOS or NES/Famicom and they work just fine on Linux; they do still make games for old systems, including Gruniozerca and others.)
Steam. Many native AAA games such as Total War Three Kingdoms, Age of Wonders 3, Civilization 6 and you can play most Windows-only games with Steam's Proton.
My father still does crosswords daily. Much of this amounts to digitised Soduku, Crosswords, Solitaire etc.. - passing time on light fare.
A new Netflix special on games 'High Score' touches on the gender issues and how some games for whatever reason have entirely different demographic appeal: Pac Man and Tetris were (still in the later case) disproportionately popular among women.
The medium obviously allows for much more, but we can't ignore the social parallels.
> However, only about 250 million people are active console users who regularly buy new games for them. Although they represent only 8% of the total number of gamers, this is the group with the highest revenue per person.
Why is there an "although" at the beginning of that sentence? Why wouldn't they be generating the highest revenue person?
PCs are more expensive than consoles, so one might be led to think that PC gamers have more money than console gamers and thus spend more on games than their console brethrens.
PCs are definitely not more expensive than consoles when you compare the TCO over a year or two, and that gulf keeps getting wider the longer you're on PC.
This was true even before Steam sales and Humble Bundle and free games on the Epic Store and and and...
I wish there was a better way to preserve the history of video games, as operating systems become incompatible, emulators become obsolete, and some things just can't be emulated accurately or faithfully anyway (like the 3DS).
Ironically, YouTube is probably the best archive of video games that we have.
I’ve become a big player of board games online, mostly terraforming Mars. Given how fast this is spreading I wouldn’t be surprised if we found that gaming overtakes every entertainment option around.
I think more will play if quickly trying out games was easy. E.g. I wanted to try out Doom Eternal yesterday without having to buy it first in case I didn't like it; couldn't find how to do that and gave up after 20 mins.
I did some research into this when I worked for Improbable a few years ago, and back then it was remarkably difficult to try out games without going through a full purchase and refund cycle, which in many cases was hit-and-miss and could actually get your account suspended in some stores which has tremendous impact since this is also tied to your online gaming persona. Since then I know some stores have loosened their policies and allow for a certain number of hours of game play within which you can get a full refund, and others have a time-since-purchase kind of limit.
Back in the day when shareware was a thing it was much more prevalent with game demos, but that was also before game consoles really took over. Then physical stores made a difference, where you could go and try out a game before purchase, but of course those aren't really much of a thing anymore.
My conclusion of the research then was that most games are simply not built with a demo in mind. It's more common these days for games to front load the introduction part of the game, often a tutorial, so that you can start playing before the game is fully downloaded, but back then it wasn't very common. This could work as a stand-alone demo and I know a few games that does this – Tomb Raider for example – from which you could then unlock the full game and download the rest. But it was (and might still be) an exception to the norm.
My opinion is that online stores can and should put pressure on game devs (and engine makers in particular) to enable customers to play a demo of a game before committing to a purchase. It might not work for all kinds of games (particularly ones without single player elements) but I reckon it ought to work for a majority of them.
This comes from the industry abandoning making demos available because they would hurt sales figures. There's been a recent resurgence in making demos over the last six months though.
I'd like to see research to support the sales hypothesis. I've heard it before as well but never seen any actual data to support the argument. It's also a really tricky thing to research, given triple-a developers typically don't like sharing much.
Xbox Game Pass is like Netflix for games, you pay a small subscription each month and get to essentially rent hundreds of games. Sounds like it might be what you're after.
Unfortunately I don't have an xbox (kids at home so worried of addiction) and play very occasionally. I wouldn't mind for a service that allows to rent a game short-term e.g. 5 hours for a dollar - cheap and long enough to try a game without any extra hardware/commitment.
I find this to be the most disturbing part. I have done a substantial amount of game development myself on the side, it's how I got into programming originally ~15 years ago. I say that because I find it demotivating sometimes to work on games that I think are fun and non-addictive. My wife will show me some simple addictive game on the phone and ask why I can't just make a knock-off version of that... I could, but at what cost?
Some part of me really wishes that "gambling" in games would finally get cracked down on to level the playing field for the rest of us.
I now have a 5 month old son and that has really amplified my thinking of the future. I will of course educate my children on the dangers of addictive games, etc. but what about others? It's sad, but also classic "think of the children!"
I wholly wish micro transactions would be made illegal. To me micro transaction is equivalent to a movie pausing mid scene and ask "Do you want to continue watching this scene? You can if only you pay 99 cent.". It's a pure evil practice that taints games.
Half the "gamers" are on candy crush or supercell mindlessly clicking away, getting pavlovian salivations whenever some chest reward notification rings. With these numbers its an epidemic.
The same can be said about drugs or any kind of addiction...At the end of the day you have to wonder if the "fix" helps you or puts you in a worse situation. Usually is the latter.
I don't know if it's helpful to think of people playing video games as trying to fix anything besides boredom.
It is about as innocent of an addiction as you can have and is likely better than tv or alcohol, which are the other go-to options for making the time go by. Remember, when USA tried a prohibition on alcohol, it did not go over well. People have a strong need to make the time go by and unwind - video games are likely the least destructive form of doing so.
I use to have friends hooked up to the screen (16 hours per day 365 days per year) I tell them that alcoholics have conversations and social lives and they get out of the house.
I think that's a very interesting question. "Gamer" has always been a bit of a niche tag but with games now becoming more and more mainstream it will be like calling people that watch movies "moviers", which we don't do since we assume most people enjoy a movie every once in a while.
This is such a weird attitude. If someone was to say (figures made up) "over two billion people worldwide now drink beer" then "if you count Budweiser then sure", would be a bizarre response. Candy Crush is clearly a game; this isn't really ambiguous. It's a mass market game that game connoisseurs sneer at, sure, but it's a game.
I get your point, but I think it's more accurately framed like so:
"Over three billion people are now drinkers"
"If you count having a glass of wine once a week then sure"
The perceived snobbery is less about whether these people are playing games and more about whether they can be accurately described as "gamers", a term which has meaning beyond simply "players of any game(s)" due to its many (largely negative) connotations.
Adding onto this, imagine how you would feel if someone said
"There are 3 billion Spanish speakers worldwide"
But then you learned that only 500 million were really fluent, and the rest ranged from broken Spanish that was enough to get by in a Spanish speaking country to people who were forced to take a Spanish class in highschool and never used it again.
I think this concept of "fluency" in games is probably a more useful metric. The question is, if I dump you in front of a game that you've never played before, but it conforms to the language of video game design, how quickly can you beat it? I would imagine that someone who only played Candy Crush would not understand how to move their camera around in a 3D environment, for example.[1]
You could extend the metaphor further, for example Spanish is spoken in many different ways around the globe, and therefore some people who speak one dialect of Spanish can't understand another dialect of Spanish. The same could be true for games, and we would need to classify and understand these dialects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw Interesting video talking about what games are like for a non-gamer, shows an example of not understanding how to move the camera and the player at the same time.
Given the notion of "fluency" proposed by the GP, the idea would be that a "fluent" gamer would not be described with "played only X games". You would be fluent if you could "communicate" in multiple genres -- having a sufficiently thorough vocabulary.
But this is just weird gatekeeping. You could for example be extremely fluent in a single genre but uninterested in others. For example I've been playing games for over 30 years and don't really know the genre conventions of match-3 games beyond the obvious. Similarly I know very little about MOBAs or gacha style games or visual novels. And I'm a game designer!
IMO one of the worst aspects of modern "gamer" culture is this insistence on purity tests particularly when they're aimed at games that are extremely popular with women.
Even in terms of market segmentation I don't think the distinction of "overall gaming fluency" is very measurable or meaningful.
You can't have the same conversation between someone who plays only candy crush, and someone who plays a wide variety of games. Its like saying that 8 billion people read books -- but 7.9 billion of that only read harry potter. Suddenly that 8 billion readers is far less notable.
There's a scale to your level of hobbyism -- a lot of people only play games as long as their friends do, because its simply a social tool (replacing the mall). The current flavor just happens to fall under video games, but theres no stickiness -- if the next popular thing is laser tag, they'll shift out and never think about games again.
The notion of trying to define this scale as a problem is also largely unique to gaming -- it exists elsewhere without issue. Painting, movies, programming, literature, music, engineering etc there's no issue saying that someone is dipping their toes into the subject, or has purely commercial interest in it (eg I only watch best selling movies, or only marvel) or has an actual interest in it (a -phile, a hacker, etc)
I think the key difference is the prevailing belief that there is no depth to this subject, so the only difference between a casual entrant and a hobbyist and a professional is an arbitrary checklist.
Obviously I disagree -- there is depth, and therefore, there is a difference between "gamers", as they fall between the ranks in understanding that depth. Ofc theres no great metric, and you can't define it in detail, but the difference between a candy-crush-only "gamer" and a genre-agnostic "gamer" and a genre-loving "gamer" and a read-the-literature (what little exists) "gamer" in recognizing and communicating about that depth is readily apparent
Yes you can create a taxonomy but is it interesting or useful? If 7.9 billion people only read Harry Potter that’s very very significant. If we say “well they’re not real readers” that’s just being ignorant and gate keeping.
The problem mostly comes from people who define their hobby as their life. I play games a lot and make them professionally but wouldn’t call myself a gamer. I don’t see my wife playing Match-3 games on her phone as lesser than my wife playing Baldurs Gate. Likewise I can enjoy Sage Solitaire and Escape from Tarkov.
Gaming is mainstream now and people who feel threatened by that need to grow up.
I disagree. I used to know plenty of people who only played FPS. Also people who only played 1 or 2 different FPS. Are these people not gamers? Saying that you need to play X games or games in X number of genres is not something I agree with it
They would be less "fluent" than otherwise. It's a scale, not a binary switch.
It would be the difference of trying to communicate about movies between someone who has only ever seen marvel films, and someone who watched say the entirety of the criterion collection. Or the difference between technical sales and engineers. It'd be fairly meaningless to give them the same label -- one is clearly capable of a more advanced communication on the subject than the other, if only because they've experience a larger subset of the subject.
Of course, you could also play the living hell out of a single game and be extremely fluent about only that one game -- which is clearly different than someone being fluent about games in general. We wouldn't expect someone who only ever played SC2, even if he had put 2000 hours into it, to have anything notable to say about FPS games and RPGs.
As you've opined, the marker of when you'd be considered a "gamer" vs otherwise is an arbitrary meaningless distinction, a random line drawn in the sand, but that's why "fluency" is trying to be introduced as an alternative.
> The perceived snobbery is less about whether these people are playing games and more about whether they can be accurately described as "gamers", a term which has meaning beyond simply "players of any game(s)" due to its many (largely negative) connotations.
Video games have been a large part of my life since I could hold a controller. The sooner I can mention the game I played last night in casual conversation without people assuming I'm a controller-throwing, gamerword-spewing child with no impulse control or social intuition, the better.
The last time I mentioned I played Dark Souls the conversation turned to how horrible the community is, with the implication that I spend my time telling people to "git gud" and invading new players to make them miserable. Never mind that I helped probably 10-12 people beat Capra Demon that night with no ingame reward past "humanity" which I already have more than I need.
I'm confused why there's some implication of diminished frequency with "casual" gamers.
On the subway, it's not uncommon to see people playing games like candy crush on their commute to and from work. The average subway commute is an hour long each way. Playing two hours a day is a decent chunk of time. Engaging in any other hobby for even 30 minutes a day would put you squarely in at least the "enthusiast" category by most definitions.
Even excluding commutes, it's quite common for me to see people playing mobile games during e.g. their lunch break.
So, I think a better analogy would be more like:
"Over three billion people are now drinkers"
> "If you count drinking a budweiser every day then sure"
> On the subway, it's not uncommon to see people playing games like candy crush on their commute to and from work.
It may have to do with the difference in "I will play this game instead of staring into the void" vs "I will buy that game and set aside time to play it". Would people on the subway play candy crush if they didn't have to commute? There's a fine line, I believe.
And then there's another fine line with regards to what counts as "video game". Is computer chess a video game because it's played on a computer, or is it simply chess? How many people would say "I'm going to play on the computer" vs "I'm going to play some chess" when they're going to play chess on their computer? "Video games" aren't the same as "mobile games" in my opinion, though there are video games on mobile devices, but e.g. Solitaire isn't a video game.
And last but not least: I'm pretty sure most people who play Minesweeper on their commute but aren't otherwise into computer games would self-identify as "gamers".
> It may have to do with the difference in "I will play this game instead of staring into the void" vs "I will buy that game and set aside time to play it". Would people on the subway play candy crush if they didn't have to commute? There's a fine line, I believe.
That seems like a weird distinction to draw, given the numerous other activities you could be doing with that time (reading a book, for example). Clearly, they downloaded candy crush with the intention of playing it. The time they set aside is their commute.
If I purchase a Switch solely to play e.g. Octopath on the subway, am I no longer a "gamer" simply because I'm just using it as an alternative to staring out into the void?
FWIW: IIRC Candy Crush's most popular "day of the week" is Sunday, meaning people ARE setting aside time to play.
> And then there's another fine line with regards to what counts as "video game". Is computer chess a video game because it's played on a computer, or is it simply chess?
Yes, that's true. I think that leads to interesting questions about what qualifies as a video game. Do all the e.g. sim games (bus sim, flight sim, etc.) count as video games? What about Madden/etc?
However, I don't think any of that's relevant here: There's no real-world counterpart to Candy Crush.
> "Video games" aren't the same as "mobile games" in my opinion, though there are video games on mobile devices, but e.g. Solitaire isn't a video game.
I think that's a pretty reductionist view of mobile games, especially given the roots of video games. Candy Crush isn't any more simplistic than say, Ice Climber or Tetris (or substitute that with most other early NES-era games).
I don't think you want to put arbitrary complexity requirements on games to be considered "true games", otherwise we'll have to re-evaluate a lot of titles: E.g. are Telltale games "video games", or are they just choose-your-own-adventures on a computer? What about Tetris?
And that's to say nothing of the other point you mentioned, which is that increasingly "modern" games are available on mobile devices. One of the top sellers on the iOS app store is Minecraft, which I think everyone would consider qualifies as a video game. Epic is currently going through a massive battle with Apple over them kicking Fortnite off the app store.
> And last but not least: I'm pretty sure most people who play Minesweeper on their commute but aren't otherwise into computer games would self-identify as "gamers".
I will posit that is largely because of the stigma around being a "gamer", partially warranted (gaming communities can be notoriously toxic) and partially not.
This is somewhat self-reinforcing because many adults who should identify as "gamers" don't want to be associated with that term (I count myself in that group, which is partially why I'm so passionate about this topic). Viewpoints like "mobile games don't count as real games" don't help either, by excluding everyone but the most diehard.
Again, I think with any other hobby it would be hard for you not to qualify as at least an enthusiast if you spent an appreciable amount of time engaging in it. If I read novels for 2 hours a day, it would be quite appropriate for someone to label me as a "reader".
> That seems like a weird distinction to draw, given the numerous other activities you could be doing with that time (reading a book, for example).
I believe it's similar to the difference between running because you're late and need to catch the bus and going for a run because you want to run. One is the end ("I want to play a game"), the other is a means ("I want to kill time on the train and a book is too complicated").
Tetris isn't a video game in my opinion, but it's a computer game. A video game involves video of some kind of world to move in, be that a football field you're running on, a race track you drive on, or a wasteland you crawl through. Maybe you could make the immersion a distinction, but I'm not sure about it.
> I will posit that is largely because of the stigma around being a "gamer", partially warranted (gaming communities can be notoriously toxic) and partially not.
I don't know. I've never been part of any gaming communities, but there has been a time when I played a lot of games and if asked, I would've said that I'm a gamer. I haven't for years, so I don't consider myself a gamer now.
> Again, I think with any other hobby it would be hard for you not to qualify as at least an enthusiast if you spent an appreciable amount of time engaging in it.
I'm not sure. I've watched a lot of movies but I'd never consider myself a movie buff, I just liked cheap entertainment. I believe it's different with books because there has to be intention, reading isn't the path of least resistance, it requires more intention than candy crush, movies, meme scrolling or listening to music or a pod cast.
Similarly, driving a car to work (or using public transportation) isn't really saying anything about you. Biking to work all year, no matter the weather, is different.
I don't think it's about "gate keeping" as much as wanting clear communication. It's not useful to call everyone a gamer that has ever in their life played a game on an electronic device. It's not useful to call everyone a climber that has ever in their life climbed something, be that a mountain, tree or bunk bed.
And my general opinion: don't worry about identifying yourself as a gamer because of some stigma. People who are worth talking to will usually ask and find out what you're talking about. It may be a good litmus test to quickly sort out those that live by factory made opinions. Don't bother trying to be liked by them.
We're probably unlikely to come to an agreement here, I think because we have fundamentally different opinions on what constitutes a hobbyist (and, I think, also a video game). I really fail to see the difference between someone playing Mario Odyssey on a Switch on the train every day vs. someone playing Candy Crush every day on the train.
If you chose to bike to work every day, I would call you a biker. If you watched a movie every single day, I would say watching movies is a hobby of yours. If you went to a rock climbing gym every day, I would call you a climber.
Driving, and some other fields like cooking, are quite different. You're not choosing to engage in that behavior - it's a requirement for your life. Same with cooking food. You need to get to work, you need to eat. You don't need to play Candy Crush on the train - and obviously, many people don't.
> And my general opinion: don't worry about identifying yourself as a gamer because of some stigma.
I don't mean to be a negative ned, but I'm not talking about the "neckbeard loser" stigma. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, that's probably for the best.
I’m just saying that if you count anyone who has ever played Candy Crush, your stats aren’t going to be particularly meaningful, and you’ll end up with a number like “three billion”.
If the same number was cited for beer drinking, I’d be saying “sure, if you count anyone who’s ever had a Budweiser”, and it would be a valid criticism.
I get what you're saying. It would be interesting to see the statistics on how many people play non-casual videogames. And how many people drink craft beer.
Though with videogames, it's still a meaningful statistic to include "casuals" considering it used to be taboo to play videogames at all as an adult.
> If someone was to say (figures made up) "over two billion people worldwide now drink beer" then "if you count Budweiser then sure", would be a bizarre response.
I know several people that would say exactly that. There are a lot of beer snobs in this world. If it's not Belgian/German/homebrew/etc. it's not beer.
To me the problem is that some free-to-play mobile games are the equivalent of twiddling your thumbs. If you're curious about trends in gaming and esports, this data just isn't very useful because it's combining segments that really don't have much in common.
Also mobile games have deservedly earned a reputation as blatant dopamine pumps and many don't deserve to be considered 'real video games' any more than Facebook or Instagram.
It's like measuring how many people know how to cook and then including people who do microwave dinners. It's technically not incorrect and there's nothing wrong with the people who microwave, it's just not a very useful piece of data.
I think Candy Crush qualifies as a video game, if only by the most technically narrow of definitions. But it's a pretty hard sell to put the stereotypical Candy Crush style game player in the same category as someone who owns and regularly utilizes a console. There is overlap, obviously, but that's also clearly not what we're discussing.
At some point the casual application of "video gamer" will make the term meaningless--especially as we move toward almost ubiquitous electronic interfaces and devices for even the most mundane of life's activities.
I'm fascinated by this opinion. Is Hearthstone a video game? Desert Golfing? Good Sudoku? Words with Friends? Clash Royale? Angry Birds? The Arcana? Wii Sports? Pokémon Go?
I don't know most of those, but I think the point is whether video is being the defining feature of the game. Chess played on a computer is primarily chess, not a computer game. Same with poker.
A golfing or racing game isn't similar to golfing or racing, it's clearly primarily a video game. It gets somewhat blurry when you have a high-end setup with a cockpit that's being shaken while you drive a rally. Is it still a video game, or a simulator? I'd say the latter, but it's an edge case.
Angry Birds is, to me at least, closer to a video game (though I'd say it's a different genre "mobile game"), because there's obviously not a directly transferred real-life version.
I don't understand why it's apparently controversial that we can break a category like computer gaming into a spectrum of activities and styles.
We do it in many other areas without such issue, e.g., recreational vs. amateur vs. professional athletics, cooking, artistry, etc. If a report were published that said "250 million adult Americans are cooks" I'd find it objectionable. It's not a meaningful number, either in terms of market segmentation or as a description of the actual activity that is purported to be engaged in.
You are using this argument in a thread about whether Candy Crush is a "video game". Not whether it is, shooter, RPG or racing game. Nor whether playing on subway counts as e-sports.
The problem here is that the breakdown is completely arbitrary based on "how much I feel related to people who play it". It is not based on hours played, someone who plays on console less of time can count. It is not by effort spent, someone who plays repetitive grinding games on console still counts. It is not even per who self-identifies as gamer, that is not question in the thread at all. The thread is all about whether candy crush counts as game or videogame.
"250 million adult Americans cook" is perfectly valid thing to write in a report, even of those people don't do special French receipts.
So really, what it is about is that some self-identified gamers take offense on the idea that games which target different demographics can be talked about as a games. And while there are many cultural/emotional things that make it so, it still seem impossible to come up with reasonable definition that excludes candy crush. Candy crush is an insult to most gamers despite majority of them not knowing next thing about that game, except that it was huge success among people they, frankly, find inferior.
The origin of the report is a market intelligence publication about gaming. The controversy over "Candy Crush" is almost an irrelevant detail in this context.
“Casual” video gaming, a term that carries unfortunate dismissive undertones, represents the most common form of video games played. The proliferation of the smart phone has undoubtedly helped here.
Probably more so pre-pandemic. My observation when I lived in Chicago is that many people played these games while commuting via mass transit, I’m sure fewer are doing that now.
Decades ago, people did crosswords or read the paper/books while commuting.
Do see a bit of sudoku. It would be interesting if there are music vs audiobooks metrics on today’s commuters. I get the commute escapism of candy crush but I’ve seen enough of that in homes/work to wonder.
I wonder if crosswords are moving away from a commute activity and toward a home leisure/hobby activity. (That's what I see, but I'm biased by the way I relate to crosswords myself and the way people I met through puzzle activities relate to them.)
Right. I have some activities that are way more dubious than Candy Crush as to whether they are "video games".
For example I played Love Letter on Board Game Arena on Tuesday. Clearly if I played the "real" Love Letter that isn't a video game, it's a card game. So maybe playing it on BGA is still a card game, except the cards don't exist and I'm on a web site?
Sometimes on Tuesday I play Through The Ages. TTA was created as a board game, but obviously in the pandemic you can't safely go to somebody's house and sit around playing board games for hours. So there's a version that's a Steam game. Is that a video game? Or is that still just a board game I'm playing via Steam?
Sometimes we play D&D online instead. Is that a video game? Is it a video game if we're doing a 4th edition combat encounter, so that exact positions and movement matter? How about if it's a roleplayed skill check scenario instead?
Is an Infocom text adventure game a video game? How about a point-and-click like Monkey Island?
Is designing courses in Mario Maker 2 a video game?
Is writing Python code for my Compact Claustrophobia (Minecraft modpack) robot to more efficiently construct things for my play a video game?
These are things that require some clear fundamental idea of what video games are to guide principled decisions. Whereas Candy Crush is just obviously a video game.
If Candy Crush isn't a video game then I'm pretty sure arcade Space Invaders wasn't a video game either.
I'd argue that ultra-casual games like Candy Crush have so little in common with "core games" that it's not particularly useful to consider them the same thing.
A similar situation:
If I was discussing "board game culture" I think that most people would recognize that I'm referring the culture associated with games like Catan or Pandemic as opposed to people casually playing Tic Tac Toe.
No-one's talking about 'board game culture', though. This is about whether people play video games. If you were talking about the board games people play, Catan would be a barely visible blip; it'd be all about things like Monopoly. Now if you were talking about people who consider playing games part of their identity, I'd be inclined to agree (though there are edge cases; Pokemon Go falls into both 'casual game' and 'game that people get a bit weird about', for instance), but that's not at all what this survey is about.
EDIT: Also, well, media evolves. If you look at the sort of TV that's popular now, a lot of it is dramatically different to how it was in, say, the 80s and 90s. Someone who'd been in a coma since before Seinfeld came out would find modern sitcoms (with their lack of laugh tracks), and high production value dramas with multi-season story arcs (barely existed until this century), and reality shows, extremely weird. But they'd recognise that it was TV. And some 80s-style content still exists; it's just largely not what is popular right now.
My point is that "people who play video games" doesn't mean much if you define it so broadly that it includes both people who play primarily core games and people who play exclusively casual games.
From a business perspective, they are unlikely to be the same target market. Gaming related memes and similar cultural artifacts are unlikely to be shared. Etc.
It certainly means that if you're a video game making company, the market of potential customers is huge. That seems valuable.
This argument seems popular with people who like Very Serious Video Games, and are affronted by being associated with filthy casuals (the gamers, not the brand).
What potential customers, though? You wouldn't know whether they are 1% mobile games or 99% mobile games. Given that any company wouldn't "just make a game", this statistic isn't useful.
Similarly "all people eat food" isn't really helpful if you're wondering how large the market for artificial meat is.
I really dislike any attempt to draw a distinction between “casual” (a dismissive term) games from “core” games. This is pure gate keeping behavior; an attempt to diminish some games (and therefore their players) as being less real than others.
If you wish to separate “core” gamers, do it by device or by category, since that is much clearer and carries less of a value judgement.
I get the negative reactions to this, I really do. All communities - fan clubs, beer aficionados, gamers, book enthusiasts - have groups of gatekeepers that try to separate the dirty filthy unworthy casual people from the real X.
But don't assume that is always the case. Sentiments like this often comes from a different place: wanting meaningful discussion.
There are two parts to this. "X game" vs "Y game" categorization, and "plays games" vs "played a game". The first one is usually contentious so I'll elaborate:
I play Candy Crush and games like it regularly, and enjoy them. However, I call them "casual games" rather than "video games" in the same way people like to separate "board game" from "party game", "jogging" from "running", "visual novel" from "comic book", and "web design" from "programming" (or "sanwdich" from "hotdog"). The borders frequently get blurry, and people love discussing pedantic philosophy about what is a sandwich, but the grouping still exists and is meaningful. While people who don't have a lot of interest in the field find the distinction weird and pointless, the people who are close to the field find the difference to be night and day. I play and enjoy Terraforming Mars which I classify a board game, Dying Light which I classify a video game, and Super Hexagon which I classify a casual game. Conflating the category of any two of them feels equally wrong. They are different activities, played for different reasons, at different times, with different levels of investment.
Any study and discussion that manages to recognize at least these broad distinctions, will be immensely more interesting and fruitful than one who tries to count hotdogs as sandwiches.
One absolutely doesn't need to be a foo in order to engage in foo gatekeeping. In fact I would go so far as to say the preponderance of gatekeeping is done by people who are not in the group they are gate keepers of.
Candy Crush has 250-275 million active users. Do some digging if you want an accurate picture. Saying this game or that game counts shows a willful choice to not engage in the conversation, and perhaps a fundamental lack of understanding as to what constitutes a video game.
Healthy, fit people will just continue becoming more and more rare and ascendant in our society.
Though in 100 years we'll have VR that's as seamless as unlocking your phone. Maybe games will be the healthy jacked guys in school through all the incidental exercise.
https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2020-shading-cours...