Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases (pcgamer.com)
- Reference: 0175710227
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/12/20/151224/steam-gamers-spend-just-15-of-time-on-new-releases
- Source link: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/only-15-percent-of-all-steam-users-time-was-spent-playing-games-released-in-2024/
Legacy titles [1]dominated playtime , with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/only-15-percent-of-all-steam-users-time-was-spent-playing-games-released-in-2024/
New games have gotten worse (Score:3)
Despite having much more powerful CPUs and GPUs, games haven't really improved in graphics. We've been promised 4K and 8K gaming for years now, yet devs have admitted to being lazy and over rely on DLSS and related technologies and still think 30FPS is acceptable. Just like Chromium took over the internet, independent graphic engines got weeded out most devs just use the bloaty Unreal engine. It's no wonder people are playing games back when real care was put into the code. This is why we need to legalize piracy of delisted games, to stop revisionist developers hiding old work.
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> This is why we need to legalize piracy of delisted games
I agree that we need to revise copyright law to address the problem of abandoned works, but is it really piracy if copying is legal?
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The CPUs and GPUs did not get that much better, as they have in the past.
The jump to 4K was a bit much (but it had to happen, 4K displays are very affordable).
The people in charge don't seem to be nerds anymore. It seems to be business and arts majors running things more now. But this really is geek culture. And if artsy people take charge, I expect better writing, better NPC modeling, world building etc. These have not seen significant improvements and in some studios famed for these, it seems to have gott
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This ^^, fire up GRID AutoSport, Fallout 3, or BioShock Infinite, set the resolution to 1080p and crank all the other video settings to full - You can this with very modest hardware now. None of those titles will look "dated" run that way. For the most part the game play isnt far removed if at all from current titles either.
We have not had a generational leap forward in capability, since about the xbox360 era really. DLSS might be more than just fancy up-scaling but from what I have seen if you are playi
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The way I see it games have only improved on graphics and became relatively worse on gameplay, plot, enemy AI.
What good are shiny visuals when the game is repetitive or the enemy is so predictable it's like shooting fish in a barrel?
For instance, I like the large space of Far Cry 5, but prefer Far Cry 2 where the opponents at least hide when they realise they're being sniped. And the graphics are just fine.
Or Borderlands 2 which I'm exploring now has good ideas, but suffers also from predictable AI and some
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Score:2)
Hidden reason for this is because new games on Steam are usually broken as hell for the first year or so. Say what you will about Nintendo, but Valve could stand to take a page from their book on quality control.
GoG players are even worse (Score:5, Informative)
If you think this is bad, you don't want to look at GoG players. Many of them spend their time playing 20-30 year old games!
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That's me! Total Annihilation is still a kickass game from 1997.
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Truth! I'm currently playing through a bunch of the old Sierra games from way back (Kings Quest series, Quest for Glory/Hero's Quest/etc).
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And best of all those games can be played without needing to phone home to some server which might not exist after a few years.
Or need a gaming rig with the latest CPU and bloated videocard and then still crawl at times because of the crappy lazy code of the game.
I wish I had the source code and/or map editor for some games so I could fix and change things. That's what I love about Neverwinter Nights for instance, it's actually a D&D framework to build your own adventures. As well as Doom and Quake wher
"Legacy" can mean 3 months old? (Score:2)
You can't really get much information from this. If I buy a game in Jan 2024 that came out in Dec 2023, that's not "Legacy", that's brand new.
I do wait though in a lot of cases. I don't want to pay full price when I can often get it for 35-60% off within the next 12 or so months. Steam's wishlist makes that easy. Just wait until I'm notified of a sale and see if the price is right yet.
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A really great single-player game with a story can take hours and hours to play through... and have significant replay value afterwards.
But I'm still really only willing to fork over the price of a movie ticket for it, so yeah, I'm not buying ANYTHING new. Game prices are ridiculous. A little bit of patience and you end up having so much more for the same amount of money.
Novelty and quality have changed (Score:2)
Home computer games were text-based. Occasionally ASCII. Then very low res monchrome, then a few colours.
Point is, games hit 'good enough' more than a few years ago, and now the engagement comes primarily from the mechanics and story. Better graphics are 'nice' but a more satisfying story with a better interface is more important.
When somebody gets that right, that game is no longer obsolete in a few years because of technological improvement. It will last until somebody makes something better, not just
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nethack is still a awesome game... yes, crap graphics, but it is a game that i return to play every few years, it is fun, hard, challenging and after the initial scare with the interface, it quiet usable ... and yes, it run just fine now as in a 486 cpu 30 years ago
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Yep, and I occasionally play NetTrek or whatever it's called. Retro fun! But most of those old games are just too clunky, slow, and frustrating for nostalgia to make them fun to play for long.
Every once in a while I load up my old Infocom games and it takes about 5-10 minutes before they go right back into storage where they belong.
Every new game has to compete with the corpus (Score:2)
of all games released on the platform for the past couple of decades, and newer games doesn't always mean "better"
"Steam saw a 70% jump in new game play time" (Score:2)
The need to learn how to properly lie, err market, statistics.
Before you jump to conclusions, (Score:1)
Take a look at the top 10 games at any given point. Dota2, CS2, GTAV, Rust, PubG, Apex Legends... And wallpaper engine.
Anecdotes are not data (Score:2)
I strongly suspect Factorio ate up a bunch of the other 85%. The October re-release basically one-shotted the entire PC-using engineering world. :D
Outlier (Score:2)
[looks at his 14 hours spent on Skyrim this past week]
No no no (Score:2, Insightful)
If the industry starts paying attention to this, they are absolutely going to start leaning on valve to discourage playing older games and something is going to become a lot more annoying.
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I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
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> I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
I haven't personally been a gamer in a very long time, but it was my experience that for multiplayer games, a new game had to really offer something novel to justify players shifting from their then-current favorites over to the new game.
New games cost money or otherwise had to be somehow acquired.
New games might not have had all the trappings required for support working right.
New games had a chicken-and-egg problem, if no users the no users would transition.
New games on the same gaming engine might offer
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I'm not sure that they'll end up going after Valve to get the results; but it's arguably the case that we've already seen the (really annoying) adaptation:
"Older games" certainly includes various well loved singleplayer titles or 'classic' multiplayer ones that don't kick back to the mothership anymore; but it also includes 'live service' and not-technically-live-service-but-look-at-all-those-skins-and-battle-passes titles that happen to have original release dates from some time ago.
Something like DO