I miss the days when the sole purpose of video games was for the players to have fun. Not spend money via microtransactions, not grind away like it's a full time job, just plain and simple fun.
@@dylanlewis2766 Stuff can be grindy but rewarding. New games are grindy with either no rewards/bad ones/limited or you have to buy loot boxes to get anywhere.
Not every game needs to be a live service. Players are going back to old behaviours of enjoying a game for a bit then moving onto the next one. I think if this continues, game quality may actually improve because devs can justify making a polished, self-contained experience.
I actually consider this is good to gamers. This phonemenon means the business of "Games as a service" has become less sustainable and profitable and it would force game developers to reconsider their strategy. More one-time purchase titles to come I hope.
Too true I think the repetitive microtransaction,skin,lootbox whatever phase is almost over. CS:GO made skins awesome and resellable and then Fortnite made them a big draw and now its every single game that comes out to the point where skins and micros are not special anymore and lost the 'cool' factor. having some 1k skin in csgo meant others were like holy shit you have what?!? and now people dont even know the skin at all anymore cos we have 1000s for every game. Also when I was young we had BF MW BO and Halo and that was really the main 4, my school had at least 60% of the kids on halo 3 and then mw2 and bo1 and it made us friends to this day no matter how different we are and now its like these 8 kids play pubg, these 6 kids play warzone, these 50 play fortnite, a few play halo some are on cold war, a couple on csgo, sprinkle some on bf1 and few on bf4 maybe throw 7 kids on wow and a handful on overwatch, 4 on rts games and the rest split between destiny 1/2 and the rest split between all games old and new. I miss the only rivalry being PS v Xbox v PC and all three having large exclusive games. Xbox had CoD and Halo PC had all the BF CSGO and rpgs and PS had the jak and daxter and ratchet and clank and god of war etc. When you have everything you have nothing, when you have little you have more.
If you are running an online game you have ongoing server costs. You can't cover that with a one-time purchase, or at least not for long. If the game can't pay for itself it will get switched off.
I remember getting bored of games back 2016-2017. Maybe it was because I was in college and getting older, idk - but I remember just feeling over-stimulated with the releases that year on. Way too much content that takes a while to learn, not having the storage space for everything, micro-transactions for skins and weird bundles that made no sense plastered everywhere, too much emphasis on immersion etc gave me burnout. I just liked being able to play mw2/fallout for hours and being able to turn my brain off.
I mean anything you do for DECADES since you were a kid, and then wonder why you feel brunt out and "it doesn't have the same magic" is kinda insane..... like yeah of course, you are a grown ass adult. There are still great AAA and indie games out there, chained echos just came out this year made by one guy and is the best snes style JRPG I've ever played. Elden ring and Disco Elysium couldn't be more different game play wise. AAA publicly traded companies will always keep making games like this, but there are more good games out there than ever, it just won't be spoon fed to you by EA, Blizzard and Ubisoft
When a mediocre game like Elden Ring is praised as "awesome" and "amazing"... then you know gaming is dead. Also I've recently met people who either only play COD or Apex Legends. These guys are only playing those games to be with their friends and they don't care about having a "game experience" with a story and sadly that seems to be the case more and more.
Nah I feel like 2007-2010 was peak game I feel like there was a point n I wanna say around when mine craft/skyrim/last of us came out... Every game from then on was open world or survival crafting n looting... Or if ur fps gamer straight up pay walls n unfair leveling where anyone with a job or life could not keep up.
This is good in so many ways. We don’t want grinding mechanisms in games, neither micro transactions. For last 2 years I have been only playing indie games, and I must say indie games are way more fun than unfinished, unpolished, and expensive AAA games.
Don't forget there are still many great examples of AAA games that don't focus on those concepts. God of War, most 1st party Nintendo titles, from software games, these are the types of titles we need to support to show devs and publishers they can make money selling to us
Same! Recently I’ve been enjoying the likes of Celeste, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon and others. You can feel the care oozing out of every orifice of these indie games, and they’ve revitalized my love for the medium. I haven’t bought a AAA game since Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and that was the only one this year
@@Ruinred Agree. But they are rare. In fact, take a look at cyberpunk. It is from one of the beloved game publisher, CD Project Red. Still they messed up. Let me rephrase my idea. Anything that is full price, like $70-$80 is going to be a garbage. (It doesn't include past releases) this rule is for new releases only.
As someone who has worked in the game industry for years, in my opinion, the issue is generally the same once the company gets big enough. Producers consistently need to have degrees in psychology and analytics is the only thing that the companies high ups will accept for reason to take ANY action of any kind. As a result of this, the producer is gonna spend all their time looking at the analytics and try to show why that should validate psychological abuse to the users in an attempt to convince them to either stay longer, buy more, etc. This follows the analytics more than the devs who just want to make a fun product which also means it's a creative risk; So the quality game is replaced with a psychological analytic haze where every aspect of the game is reduced to a math problem of how do I convince the customer to do something they might not actually want.
Had one friend talk trash about "Who plays half life 2 dude" well a lot of people finished it long ago so... yeah xD, many good games get this treatment, for no good reason most of the time.
@@StefKRah People think only the hype matters. That if the entire world isn't playing that one game that it is dead. That's how my friend skipped Titanfall 2 for example. I played Republic commanding 10 years later. People play games at their own pace and not the game of the moment.
I think one of the biggest factors changing how we perceive games to be doing "well" or "dead" is that gaming is becoming less of a hobby of interacting with a medium (the game) and more about the social value (connection and experienced) derived from either the content or community.
Community is vital in games, however, I would disagree that the community aspect of games is getting stronger. Nowadays it's difficult to find games where all people are attentive engaged. Most people are in private chats or talking to people on Discord or other things. Back in the day games had more of a sense of community because everyone had to talk in the game channel. That's the only channel there was. Everyone HAD to be together...at least in the days of Xbox Live for the original Xbox. PC was probably still emulated console chatting of today.
Singleplayer games should never be called "dead games." a dead game is a game that cant provide you with the intended gameplay experience imo. meaning multiplayer games need a certain playerbase to sustain the intended player experience, if its pvp it needs to be able to match you with and against people of similar skill, if it can do this then it is not dead. it does not matter if theres 500000 servers full or if its just your 1 server, all that matters is if you get the experience you need. a live service game could have its live service ended, meaning no more updates or patches, but that still leaves the game at where it was and if it has a playerbase needed to sustain the gameplay then its not dead. vermintide 2 for example has a small but dedicated playerbase. its a 4 player coop game and you will find a 4 player lobby with no problems, so it is not dead, it will provide you the experience you paid for. it does not matter how many other people are playing in other servers, only your own matters.
As someone that is currently replaying a modded STALKER Clear Sky. I agree that singleplayer games that don´t need a server can´t die. The only thing that can kill such a game is a compatability problem with a new OS.
@@wesleygibson575 plus it’s always expected that player count is gonna go down on single player games exponentially eventually because people just play enough of it eventually to where they are satisfied and might not pick it back up again for awhile.
I prefer single player games and a physical copy of the game rather than digital downloads that can be taken away from me, even though I've paid for them.
I’m turning 37 this year. My generation in this age group basically started the early gaming trend of NES, Super Nintendo, etc. Most throughout our life’s got married, had kids, probably joined the tech Industry for a career. My time and patients for newer games is so small. 90% of the time a game is unfinished or so buggy I can barely play it. Or some battle pass to purchase. 18 different special editions, to pick from. Just to name a few. My time also to play is maybe a few hours on the weekend. I do have an older son and he’s more into mobile games or Snapchat. He has an Xbox he barely ever plays. I feel this is maybe the same for others in my age group. The golden age for video games is far over and it’s just littered with greedy companies trying to increase next quarters profits.
I have the same issue. Im 35 and I can only play one hour per day max. There is a lot of multi-player online game that I had to drop because the grind is just too big. Even if I want to buy some micro transactions the way the games are made these days is to delay as much as possible anything you want to achieve or get. For exemple a game might have a tech tree or faction that locks you into a playstyle. If one night you just want to try something different you can't... you either have to drop a lot of money (without knowing if you'll like it) of massive amount of grind time that you don't have. In the end I feel the game becomes not enjoyable as it turns itself into an other chore on my day.
Yeah I’m 38 and grew u on the NES and sega genesis. I have an Xbox one that I barely play - it just never sucked me in as the games all are similar and I have much less time and drive to play. I remember the days when I could rent a sega genesis or NES game and spend half a day figuring it out and learning it. Those days are long gone and what’s worse is todays games are more complex and I just cannot spend hours learning the basics of a game . I miss gaming as a youth!
I'm 41 and I started playing video games on the Nes, Master System and Mega Drive era, I now have a PS5 and Xbox One, I rarely play on the Xbox, and the PS5 I just watch a lot of stuff on the console as I can't be bothered to play games now. Yes are generation of gamers was the best.
Honestly never understood why people care about player count with the exception being multiplayer games which I personally don't really play. People just need to play games they love and have fun playing. Take Elden Ring, I finished it and haven't played it for months but will come back to it to experience it again. Just play games you love, simple.
I agree with this whenever discussing what games we should play with my friends I have one friend always brings up top played games on steam blah blah blah it's like dude if we can find a game who gives a fuck but that's just all he is obsessed with metas and twitch numbers. Weird.
Because gaming is not longer about making a good game and having fun it’s about money. That’s why these Game companies, Content creators and influencers are constantly bringing up player count. The higher the player count the more people can make money off it and that’s why they worry when a certain game player count starts to drop. It’s sad what’s gaming has turn it.
@@RahemtheDream13 Very good point but I would say that there is still a large part of the industry where developers just want to make good games like Elden Ring, Stray, Fobia St Dinfna Hotel or The Quarry. But I understand that the biggest companies get the attention and make most of the money plus as you said influencers/content creators also push player counts which influence those that watch/listen to them. It does suck though, as you said, that the top of the industry has become what it is today.
Because Souls has always had a very active and thriving multiplayer scene with the coop and invasions. But Elden Ring fucked up those systems and pretty much buried a lot of them under the rug or straight up removed them, causing a lot of players to see them as JUST nice little single player adventures, when in reality a HUGE draw of Souls was always their unique multiplayer interations. Not with elden ring tho, so gg From, game is dying early this time around
@@HumzahHussain Yeah there are still companies and developers that care about making a good game like Elden Ring and indie games and I fully support them just feels like there out numbered by “live Service games” and “Battle pass games”. Just miss the early days of gaming where it was all about making the best game you can and not about player count and how to milk them.
As someone who grew up playing Playstation games and is now an adult Millennial, I can definitely say the one thing I'm really missing from games nowadays is the balance between depth and quality in both lore as well as gameplay mechanics to create a unique experience. Way too often now do I feel like I am making progress by learning and mastering the environment to my advantage until suddenly a roadblock occurs and the proverbial gacha/rng carrot is dangled in front of me, telling me that I can use money to progress or sacrifice the little free time I have to grinding a certain item or quest to proceed. It becomes incredibly frustrating when half the games I play now are just repeating one loop after another with no real incentive for strategizing different tactics or making the efforts rewarding in the long run. The lore on the surface just acts like a lure to draw a player in, but once you get to the meat of the game, it's just barebones or a convoluted mess meant to keep you guessing and wanting more for nothing. I want the gameplay to be engaging to a point where it compliments the core experience, rather than just being an afterthought and companies going for psychological manipulation just to keep people engaged in their game. Shouldn't the game itself be engaging enough? Why must every popular game now have FOMO events slapped onto it as a bandaid. I think I'll just stick to my indie titles and keep my wallet firmly away from the hell that is in-game gambling from now on...
@@Spats2Bats ... I have a generation X problem. It's called making stuff up on the fly to take the piss. And it's usually taken to seriously. Usually by millennials 🤣
I think it has more to do with replay-ability of these titles. When a movie releases in cinemas you don't expect the opening weekend numbers to continue indefinitely. People have experienced it and have moved on. The same thing can be said for most players of these games. The content dries up and they leave. Nothing to be shocked about. If on the other hand the title is releasing consistent updates and content and still experiencing these declines, then that's an issue (for the developer...) And a lot of the these multiplayer games mentioned are OLD. Time to get some fresh blood into the system
Personally it doesn't matter. I'll get bored of any game eventually, no matter how much content the developers release. I'll probably come back to it after some years or months, and enjoy the content I missed that was added, but I'd return even if there was no new content. There being new content has little to zero impact on me going back to a title. No amount of content added to Path of Exile isn't going to make me play it when my hunger for ARPGs is satisfied already.
Even with great replayability most people will leave the game after beating the game. Even for rogue-likes , most people will win 2-3 runs maybe and then leave.
If that were true, Elden Ring would still have a high player count. I stopped playing it not because of a lack of replayability but because I dumped 300 hours into it in a month and got burned out.
Gaming companies are listed on exchanges so they have to keep growing their value. That means that games are now designed to make loads of money as fast as possible and roadmaps/promises entirely depends on profits. That's the reason most games die...quality don't truly matter anymore just the cash shop. Look at games like Diablo Immortal...Even though Blizzard promised the game would be the best and most grandiose Diablo experience ever (it's definitely not), their only true goal was to generate LOTS of revenues FAST for their investors. If people like the game and it lives on, great, they'll keep adding stuff to buy in the cash shop! If it dies, well, who cares they made hundreds of millions with microtransactions over a couple of months, their 2022 numbers will be good and they'll find other ways to cash grabs their player base in 2023 and so on for future years.
There's a subset of people who A) like a game B) think they know how to run a game and C) think the people currently running the game don't know how to run a game. People like this like to point at player counts as proof that everyone should sign an online petition and boycott a game so they can scream for "change". It's just an extension of tribalistic behaviors.
@@Josh-bb3xi yeah, ignoring that " tribalistic behavior" is EXACTLY why Blizzard went from absolute giant to being one of the many studios in the pockets of Microsft ( Blizzard has been purchased by Activision then Activision has been purchased by Microsoft). Genius move indeed. For Microsoft, ofc, not so much for Blizzard.
probably why web3 gaming looks so appealing to these gaming studios now, they would be able to rake in alot more cash, and promising play to earn for their customers
I also want to point out that people leaving a game doesn't always mean permanently. There are lots of games I will play for a while, take a break from, and then return to later. Everything needs a refresh time to remain fun, and that's normal and healthy.
In wow's case there has been a consistent and dramatic decline since their height in wrath of the lich king. From that release on the trajectory has been downward. Wow once held the top stop and they boasted they had 12 million players. Id be surprised if they actually had a million, paying, customers as most these days use ingame gold to pay their subs. Wow is a disgusting game that abuses you, the player. And people are increasingly unwillign to spend time and pay for that. Myself included.
It's sad to see this happening for genuinely good games that got overhyped before launch and then didn't live up to the impossible standards people expected. One of my favorite games to be released in the last year was Back 4 Blood, which is a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, but was meant to take the game in a more roguelike / deck building setup where the game had a high difficulty and you could earn cards to gain new abilities like healing the whole team whenever you use a bandage, or increase your proficiency with certain things like melee attack speed or bullet penetration. The game had a full hate campaign ran against it on youtube because it wasn't a perfect copy of Left 4 Dead with minor improvements, but rather a new take on an old game's style. It became nearly impossible to find a team with matchmaking within 3 months. Thankfully, the devs were able to salvage it, and are soon to release their 3 major expansion with new maps, characters, cards, mechanics, etc. But there was a time where I was concerned that this game I fell in love with was going to be destroyed by pissy fans who wanted a product that they didn't get. I loved this game so much I uninstalled my free game pass version and bought the ultimate edition on steam for full price just to support it, only to have haters try to tear it down the following month. Sad thing is, is that this game is genuinely designed to be fun, and not to sell microtransactions because the devs have made a hard stance against microtransactions and refuse to add them to the game. There are no MTX in this game, you get access to the DLC content if just one person in your group has it, and the game is released free on game pass, yet people still complain about the standard price tag on the game. The problem is largely with the players, not the companies, because they sabotage great games and spend countless money on MTX.
The way you described the decline in Elden Ring was what happened in my case. After 3 characters and roughly 300hrs I needed a break. I got all the achievements and after about 50 to 100hrs of pvp I was ready to put it down for a while. I'll go back to playing it probably in similar fashion to how I approach Skyrim. Months from now I'll get an itch and play somewhere in the ballpark of another 50 to 100hrs. Rinse and repeat.
it's a single player game, it's not designed for people to put in more than a couple hundred hours. I put in a bit less than 300 over 2 playthroughs and had enough for a while. I'll definitely do at least 1 more later but for now I'm good
Have you tried the expanded Free Trial of the critically acclaimed MMORPG FFXIV? You can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for FREE with no restrictions on playtime And its also been growing for 9 years
ER DLC is coming hopefully November or December. Find out at the Tokyo Games hopefully. I am on my fifth character. I have done every build pretty much running a strenght build now. I enjoy the PvE a lot though. I like to literally play for a while with most weapon types.
To me a big problem (only for multiplayer games as singleplayers can't die imo) is that games seem to never have anything to work towards. Your reward for playing the game is getting to play the game more, every skin, cosmetic etc are always behind pay walls so once you've had your fun with the game there no reason to boot it up again.
you just described OW2/OW1.5 which locked any progression behid a huge paywall or deleted it. I like the gameplay but there is zero progression and that for me was half of the fun getting the nice skin i wanted by just playing, even leveling was delted etc.
That's just my opinion but the fact that you use the word "Work" reveal one of the problems in the industry nowadays. It isn't only pay-wall but simply walls, the only reward you should want from playing a game is having fun, not keep playing to collect virtual items and feel like you are working for it. The fun is a good reason enough to boot it up again. What the point of collecting items if you don't have fun playing the game ? That's an addiction problem.
@@ksemi The word 'work' doesn't mean anything here. Alex meant 'progress'. And that is a wonderful feeling, especially in an online game, where there are things to accomplish together. That can be truly fun. And collecting things surely is one of those internal button pushers for the brain sure, it's part of the fun and addiction, but that's the same as getting a headshot or driving a fast car in a game, it's all part of setting off a 'ding' in the brain and getting the reward/rush. Some people don't have the intelligence, patience, diligence, or imagination for collections and progress. They see button smash, they want button smash, they think button smash is fun. And it is. It's all fun. And it's all addiction. And it's all 'work'. You work hard to satisfy your 'fun'. Just like Alex, just like everyone else. Don't twist people's words if you don't want someone to come along and do the same to you.
@@nothingtoseehear5012 Well, again, that's just my opinion and I'm not against progression nor cosmetics collection at all. I used to play some MMORPG, Competitives FPS and CCG online. Progressing and collecting items is a nice addition only as long as you enjoy the core gameplay of the game. I was mostly reacting to the sentence "Once you've had your fun with the game there's no reason to boot it up again" and said that it won't matter then if the content is locked behind a pay-wall, a grind-wall or even free, if you don't have fun anymore then collecting "skins and cosmetics" won't change that. I'm still playing CS from time to time since 1.6 and I never bought a skin, simply because I enjoy the gameplay and if someday I stop having fun then it won't matter if they give me all the skins for free. It would just have been a plus to have them from the start. There's actually a difference between a hobby and an addiction Just like poker, there are players who enjoy a game with friends for free and others who do it for the gambling, expecting a reward and only have pleasure when they have it. In both cases the brain releases dopamine but the mechanisms behind are different. You can enjoy both the process and the reward but when you start making efforts without pleasure for it then it's what I call working and crossing the border of the addiction. I like to believe that the jouney is more important than the destination. Addiction is a complexe subject and just like marketing and advertisement, the video-game industry has mastered it and is exploiting all the hooking/gotcha mechanisms such as built-in reward and compulsive loop, mostly in online and Mobile gaming but some people don't have the intelligence, the honesty or the courage to recognize it, they just want their reward.
Single player games can die from things like licences expiring, Driver San Francisco for example - can't even buy that game anymore except from second hand sellers
I feel like content creators with their sponsorships from developers (especially on twitch) have a big influence on why games get a large surge of players and when their sponsored stream deal ends, the streamer moves on and so do their viewers. Gaming feels more trend oriented than ever before.
I feel like it’s also because the most popular games now are multiplayer games, and every company has joined in. In the past it was just a handful of solid multiplayer games (CoD, Minecraft, WoW, etc). But now every company has a BR, shooter, mmo, etc etc. But you are completely correct. Everyone follows the top streamers. Some people I know won’t even try a game unless they watch someone play it first.
I needed to see this video. Lots of good points, and as an older millennial who also remembers the Blockbuster days of just getting something and having fun for the sake of it, I enjoy the reminder of what this video brings - just have fun, stop looking at the numbers, and it is okay to move from one game to the next - be the player, not the played.
Mentioning a single player RPG with an added multiplayer like Eldenring with a whole roster of games that are purely multiplayer is a weird comparison to make. Elden Ring player base is designed to drop off. People have mostly completed the game. The multiplayer aspect has never been that large. Its done pretty good in longevity but the decrease is quite expected and within the norm. I get the article is for player decline. but the selling point of Eldenring wasnt its community.
No he is right. Elden Ring isnt a live service like the other games. In its core design its meant to be played for a limited amount of time (sooner or later you played all weapons, spells, incantations and you explored the entire map many times over). Until a content DLC gets released the player count by design will drop to less then 1% of its peak or even average playerbase.
i saw firefall gameplay and started crying . it was one of my favourite mmo off all time , and even if im guilty of not having played enough , i still god damn wished the devs would have given us a repository of all the updates of the game with the server files and be like "the game is not profitable for us to develop and maintain anymore , go my flocks , have your own servers of your own will and have fun with what we created . be free to tweak it how you want . your time is nigh , have at it" but alas it was not the case , and yes as im writing this , i still have tears running down my eyes cuz even to this day , im mourning this game . over and out .
I feel you, friend. I was very upset when it was suddenly gone and it still makes me sad to think about. I feel like lack of marketing due to the company being small and throwing most of its resources at development might have had something to do with its demise as well as possibly it being considered in beta for longer than it needed to be as I hardly ever noticed anything broken or unfinished about it. Moreover I would think the fact that honestly... pretty objectively... it tried to do a lot of things which other games already had but tried to smush them together as a sort of 'best of all worlds' thing didn't necessarily make it feel like a copycat of other games but it probably gave enough people the "been there, done that" vibe that its 'hook' being that it Was a hybrid of the best of a lot of great concepts might have been what prevented it from enchanting more people. Other more popular games due to the companies who owned them being rich just hip-bumped them out as competition. It had a premise a bit like Subnautica meets Half-Life, gameplay similar to Destiny 2 and Overwatch which in turn just expanded on 1999's Team Fortress Classic which I played extensively and its less loyal sequel, TF2, and put it all in an open world RPG setting which was extremely reminiscent of Guild Wars 2 mechanically and the super fun motorcycle actually reminds me a lot of GW2's Roller Beetle mount which Firefall did first. I think various vehicles, had the game lived, would have resembled some of GW2's just by accident. What's to miss about it is definitely how fun all of those elements coming together actually was and the atmosphere in general. To me at least there was inexplicably a sense of... hang-outtie-ness (yeah, I'm very articulate) where I could just sit on the shore for a few hours and be fine. And the weather effects were quite memorable too, particularly when the big anomaly events popped up. City of Heroes didn't allow the selling of its IP despite the unprecedented enormous amount of money offered for it at sunset and the world famous author Mercedes Lackey leading the charge but eventually it got rescued and revived again somehow, thank goodness. I had no hope for it but I was proven wrong. Perhaps one day a miracle will save Firefall. PS: I don't know if the RPG aspects within Firefall appealed to you as much or more than the fact it was a shooter but as far as open-world events, world bosses, a sense of character immersion and the most customizable and entertaining mount/transportation system any MMO might ever have goes, Guild Wars 2 might give you a sense of nostalgia. I of course dunno if you've ever played it but in case not: imo it's very reminiscent of Firefall without the first person shooter aspect and no jump packs making you an airborne pinball in combat. Still, it can be satisfying in how it is similar and though expansions cost a bit the whole base game is free to try with only a few restrictions like chat channels and trading to prevent bots. Happy to talk more about it or help you out if you decide to play if you'll let me know. In any case, I do hope you're playing games lately that still make you happy! :} Be well!
It's cheaper to develop a game that will only run on servers the developer controls. Netcode robust enough to run on arbitrary servers, and especially the part of letting clients find these arbitrary servers, takes quite a few more man-hours than baking the IPs of official servers into game data and pushing updates to change that data of necessary. And the other part is efficient use of bandwidth: a game isn't going to have many successful community servers if getting below 100ms ping requires the server having an enterprise grade connection. The reality is, they don't want the users to realise and publish the fact that they've put all their dev time into gimmicks, pretty graphics and microtransactions while the server-side stuff is a barely-functional mess worse than ancient games like TF2 or Wolf:ET, which were made in an era where developers had no choice but to be intelligent about what is and isn't necessary to send back and forth between client and server.
I would struggle to think of an MMO to compare to the case of Firefall. The name itself is ironic, and it burned hot, grew fast and fell just as quickly. I would say it is a perfect example of a game that was released too soon. Given another dedicated 8 months of polish and more end game content it would have been a long term success. A LOT of the decline was due to bad reviews and experience due to bugs, glitches and exploits. Much of this could have been mitigated with polish and thus would have MAINTAINED a generous portion of the players who tried the game. Due to the bugs, glitches and exploits, many left the game early and others never gave the game a chance due to bad feedback. That has a compounding impact on long term success and viability. There is also the ridiculous amount of money they spent on random dumb stuff for the sake of advertising or because someone had a random idea. Personally I miss my jet packing, rocket launching, jumping, flak blasting, gliding, bike riding, justice seeking soldier wearing his samurai outfit. Shoutout to Pimpnizzle at the time.
The distance it takes for a game being fun and for it to become boring is shorter these days. The avarage age of the player base used to be 26-30 years old, that has increased as well. We're growing older and the young ones are stuck with fortnite, Roblox, minecraft, cod and Fifa games. The rest are casuals drifting from one game to another. I believe that the majority of the gamers which are adults get's bored of a game quite fast. The reason for this IMO, and from my own experience, is because the games being made is the same games you played yesterday, or last year. Todays new games are reskins and are pretty much identical to other games. Todays games are boring, yesterdays games are also boring.
100% I agree i jump from game to game I work all week and I have to have family time on the weekens I barely get to play any games 🎮 so I try to play most of them then come back to the same game and all lost what was I doing again 😁
Playing Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana reminded me how great video games can still be. The niche, indie and AA scene is a gold mine of unforgettable titles.
If you are on console then yes but if it also exist on PC it's much harder not to find something new there, there are tons and tons of indies mixing genre and taking risks now, we are very far from far cry, assassins creed and need for speed mentality on pc. Just look at city builders or even card battlers there are tons but so much that uou can easily find something great for you. That said as long as I have my staple food aka CSGO im fine. I bought a steamdeck recently and there are just too many indie games I want to play now. Too luch games to fix on one. Even if we see the next equivalent of warcraft 3 or Wow i'll never be playing only that because i would not want to miss out on indies. And consoles companies are waking up they are preparing great groundshaking titles im pretty sure because of next gen and they have to show up against the indies dominance over the market now. Years ago i would play RTS and FPS but now I can touch a little bit everything I think there's no shame in testing games trying to get a feel for it and move on if it is not keeping me. Video games are a little bit like poetry sometimes, look at simplistic genre like the SHMUPS it's an exercise of style and small difference can have big impact it's like how to find a univers on a grain and sand.
Something I noticed particularly on Steam. If you look at a games achievements a lot of the most basic achievements on a game are often not completed by the majority of people. As though they bought it and either never played it or played 20mins and put it down. This seems often the case even for games that have been out for years. Could this be contributing? Possibly imo
It's not that simple it's more the fatigue side as every kind of game has been played before and there aren't many games that feel satisfying anymore as every type of game is becoming repetitive
We're also coming out of a few years of COVID seclusion. The USA has been posting big job growth. People are putting down their games and getting back to their normal lives out in the world.
I think a large part in longevity of a title is that gameplay is very shallow these days. It doesn't take long to experience most loops in a game. Even developers that release content rarely introduce new game loops. Just a reskinned version of the same old thing.
"games are Shallow" 100%, sir. And uninteresting too. Companies don't to take any Risks or implement improved aspects from other games. My old gamer friends and I pretty much quit gaming already. Until something interesting appears. But seems unlikely.
@@joshanonline I am noticing more and more that 95% of the games that I play are indy games. They are the ones who put REAL effort into their games. Or it's remasters of really old games, too. Or just straight up old games. "Big" games are indeed shallow and are all the same thing. All MMOs I've seen are reskinned WoW, basically, and a copy of each other. Also, the ROI on them is now abysmal. It was a new genre and people poured in thousands of hours, because it was a one of a kind IP, based on an existing universe that was with us for a decade before that. I remember being in hospital as a small kid, and dad tried to cheer me up by explaining Warcraft II and then we played it together. OF COURSE WoW was special at the moment, but now...? A game that requires me to be online almost 24/7 can just bite it. There's too much nice games with interesting mechanics or incredible, edgy/serious/brilliant stories from indy devs that will give me more in ten hours than your reskin of WoW will give me in 500.
I really miss the time when a game was released, you got the entire game, and it worked as intended the second you bought it. No day 1 patch, no game breaking glitches, no microtransactions, you got what the developers said was going to be in the game and more, what was showcased in a preview was guaranteed to be in the game, and most of all we just played for fun. We didn't care how good or bad we were, you just played because you enjoyed it. Now that I do TH-cam, it's great looking back and seeing how much fun I was having. Thank you for the video. You sir have earned another subscriber. Keep up the great work!
True. Since games went online everything went to shit. Really miss when you bought it and enjoyed it as it is, no online BS and constant changes, just a fun and worthwhile finished product.
They did this back then too, minus the microtransactions cause they hadn't figured that out yet. Spore was the No Man's Sky of it's time, with a literal smoking gun in it's Collector's edition booklet showing they dropped a whole bunch of content like Aquatic mode, several creature creation features, and being able to beam down on a planet to do more than just look at the randomly generated fauna. They added some of it back but only if you bought their expansion packs for like $20 a pop. There was also the creative black hole that was the movie tie-in/licensed game, which had worse workplace conditions than EA and produced games more bug ridden and half-heartedly cobbled together than anything see previous has made. They pretty much just preyed on children and brand recognition, not too different from how TH-cam Kids operates now. In the Arcade and DVD days it was actually easier to re-release games to sweep suspicions of a broken/buggy game under the rug through revisions. If you released a shit game, it took months before word of mouth had millions of people's eyes on it since the internet wasn't as popular back then, so you could revise the game and release a 'Greatest Hits' version or just put the new game in the same disk boxes before the bad version ruined your reputation and you were in the clear. They also had some shit monetization practices too: SF2 popularized the revision formula that plagued Fighting games for two decades and are only just now breaking out of that garbage practice. Don't forget expansion packs, which could also be exploited to release a shit game and then require a $40 disk patch to make your game actually playable or give it worthwhile content. Only differences are 1) We grew up and became wiser cause of the shit practices we already went through 2) Better Internet means shit on release games get found out within hours rather than months 3) Games are a huge industry, so there are more people looking to get in for profit rather than passion. Nothing changed about the games industry, just that we became more aware of predatory practices while the games industry continued to use its very exploitable monetization schemes, now with better user monitoring technology and more than competent marketing teams to bend their users over backwards.
Those games still exist! They're just very few developers that do that anymore... Eidos Montreal, ID Software, Quantic Dream, Nintendo, Crystal Dynamics, and Remedy Entertainment, are all companies that have a track record of doing that. They release a games exactly as advertised. Devolver Digital is one of my favorite publishers because they push all these super interesting and weird indie games to the market that come exactly as advertised. They're just great.
Rose tinted glasses I think. A lot of older games were bugged to hell, with tons of glitches. They often got re-released later down the line to patch bugs and exploits, and often added more content in the form of secret dungeons, secret bosses, super bosses, new areas, characters, dialogue, new weapons and armors, enemies, items, or such things like that for their respective genres. And people have always cared if they were good, that's just human nature. Competitive by default. The scene was small but tournaments did exist and people strived to play at the top, even way back in the day during the first generation of consoles and the arcade era. I can agree on the microtransactions part though.
Due to the nature of Elden ring I think it’s likely that people play the game once for the experience and if they like it they may play it up to like 3 times more for a different build for example and then leave, the amount of time it takes to do that many playthroughs is roughly a few months for the average person I’d guess so the fall off is just people being finished with it and may return at some point for something like DLC
Exactly, same reason I haven’t played for a while, the first time exploration was amazing, i’ll never forget the feeling stumbling onto all the locations in the Lands Between but after that it loses its element of exploration
Agreed. Sure, Elden Ring is "always on", but it's still, for the most part, a single-player experience. When I finished the game, as many do, we get the option of a new game+. I know some people love to replay an experience like Elden Ring again, but me? Nope. I never bought into the new game+ experience for any game. I don't gain any value out of playing the same thing again and any differences that may be present isn't worth the time for me, especially with all these competing games vying for my attention.
The fact it blows the guys mind that games such as for honor and new world that didn't deliver on their promises are dropping in player count is really funny. He literally named Realm Royale too as if anyone actually ever played it. This is what's called begging the question and it's a master manipulation tactic by clickbaiters on TH-cam
I avoid always-online/live-service games like the plague nowadays, that essentially excludes 90% of all AAA titles in these times. Besides the issues you mentioned with stuff getting shut down down the line, most games no longer value a players time. Like, it's nice that you as a company want to keep me playing for as long as possible with all these things to do and systems, but I have a limited time to play and when the developers have essentially a to do list of dailies for me to grind out before I can start having fun with the game they clearly do not value my time.
I remember for a time we had limited internet due to location. We had only so much usage so the only game that was playable without using all the internet was WoW and I am sure there were others. I remember playing a few online always games and suddenly we had huge service charges within a week of the new month. It was crazy! Now, we do not have to worry about this because time has moved on (this was 10-years ago), and we moved to a more connected area with unlimited internet, 10x the speed, and half the cost. Makes a huge difference to not care or have to worry about internet usage.
I think it has a lot to do with the way our brains are wired and programmed now. We are brainwashed into consume, buy ,waste repeat . Our attention spans and emotions are completely different . We want to blame it on game quality and all that which may add but it's us . Take halo 2 when that game dropped I remember feeling happy I actually got joy and had fun playing by myself or with friends. I was able to play off and on 2 years or more etc without getting bored. Same with black ops 1. I haven't felt the same about in so long I can't remember the last time. Even if they dropped games like our old favorites ( but enhanced for our current technologies ) I truly believe we would hate on them and think they are garbage barely play them. It's us we gotta stop having impossible expectations learn to be happy and appreciate the small things in life again .
I think having private servers and old school server browsers extends the life of games extensively. Match making is a good feature but can only work well if there are enough players. If an oldschool game had a server for a particular map, game mode or custom game/mod a person could join an empty server. They showed interest in playing that map/node and that could lead to a domino effect of players trickling in. Also the ability to play 1v1 or any uneven number could lead to more players jumping in. I think a great feature in a queue based system would be free for all waiting room map to kill time while you wait. There are examples of similar things existing but I think every game with a queue system should have something like that. Waiting for an hour in WOW for an LFR raid where the tanks and healers can rage quit after 1 failed pull is dogshit.
Similar frustrations with destiny raids, where not only did the game force me to friend strangers with _my personal psn account_ instead of just an in game friendship, but also you would get into a raid, get part way through then have someone bail with no options for the team. It was structured to be nearly/practically impossible without enough players, so losing 1 with a team that isn't top tier would always end in frustrated attempts until enough people gave up that we ended. Over an hour of frustration is not a good way to end a gaming session, so it soured me on their endgame content. The irony is they have the very fun recipe of strike missions, which their raids take nearly every aspect and flip to the opposite.
Those are always the best experiences, cause most devs these days are making games for longevity. Once they release a game it gets a skeleton crew to not fix it or make it better but barely keep it running til the next game comes out.
For me, I got into a relationship, my friends got into relationships, and then it all went down hill from there. Kids, promotions at work, parties, meetings, a dog(s). I play single player games now (when I can), and they are usually chill games. Online multiplayer games are filled with transactions and rude people; financial anxiety and cussing are not relaxing haha. I need a game that I can drop at a moment's notice when I need to attend to the people and events in my life. Edit: I should add, yes, maybe people around the 30-something age group aren't the target anymore. Younger people are supposed to fill the void we leave behind. But that's hard to do when games become cost-prohibitive even AFTER purchase. It's not easy to ask your parents or guardian for money when they're struggling with inflation and rent. Also, if your parents are anything like millennial gamers, they will scoff at the quality of games being put out today.
THIS. I collect PC Engine shmups primarily now. Pick up and play. Who has time for the other stuff. I'm a full time partner at a national law firm. With kids and a wife and life goals. These "life replacement" games with achievements and endless grind content...aren't really games.
You failed to mention the most important point: Developers now rely on hype-marketing to rake in the profits from sales. They know it is no longer smart to invest in new/unique gameplay that will sustain a community. This is why most of the industry is about rapid growth and quick burnout , leading to "DED" games (when they realized the game is basically shallow and has solid endgame)
I also wanted to add as someone who only got into gaming very recently : gaming isn't dying. However, if you joined gaming like 15 years ago, you probably joined it for an experience that is wildly different from what's available today, which is pretty normal !
Yes. Gaming is a really broad term and doesn't really do much to distinguish the various subtypes within it. In the 90s and early 00s, games were as much of a commitment as renting a movie from blockbuster. They aren't really designed like this anymore by large publishers
@@DeusPsycho Staying at my Grandma's for the weekend and renting a video game to play together! Man did she have mixed emotions when I picked South Park rally! Good Times!
I'm apart of that 90% - main reason being I'm trying to catch up on older games slowly. RDR2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Sekiro, Deliver us the Moon, and occasionally play CoD. Could be the case for many others too, just branching out and enjoying a lot of single player games
Exactly. I used to play lots of CoD and R6, but I've mostly just been mucking around with mates in open world games like RDO and I have been playing things like ghost of tsuhsima, RDR2, God of war, uncharted, last of us stuff like that
Guardians of the Galaxy is absolutely solid and highly recommend playing it anytime you can get a chance. It's like playing a comic book, with a rich story and the writing for the characters is great.
Whether or not player numbers in a game is important or not, is entirely up to what type of game it is. For Singleplayer games it doesn't really matter. Most of them are just "buy once, play through and put down". But for live service games and MMO's, there NEEDS to be a healthy playerbase.
That, and the publishers being all too eager to axe MMOs that fail expectations. They probably think they're threatening the playerbase by sending an implied message like 'play and spend on this game or we kill it' - scaring players into paying when actually, players wised up and started looking for the axe itself before touching the game. It's also a way of sticking it to the man, when sometimes publishers make almost deliberately bad games that the community ignores so it gets sent to the shadow realm within the same year. So yeah, watch reviews, check the player count, watch dev streams (another source of insight into their commitment), roadmaps, and steer clear of anything that can't pull it's weight.
That this factor got completely ignored in this video is totally baffling to me. Using a metric for multiplayer games to judge single player games is just weird.
@@Ungeboren1988 I am baffled why didnt he put MULTIPLAYER GAMES in the title because he clearly acknowledged the difference between the two in the video and talked about multiplayer videogame exclusively.
@@Ungeboren1988 He mentioned it briefly and the rest of the time he talked just about multiplayer games and yes Elden Ring but thats technically a singleplayer game... So his title is just pure clickbait.
To me this is what made games like the single player Balders Gate games so good. It made no difference how many others were playing and by playing different characters and parties the game was very replay able and offered a completely different experiences and outcomes to the player. The original Balders gate PC game is almost 25 years old and you still have people talking about it and playing it today. This is what makes for a great game and gaming experience.
It's "Baldur's Gate", but yes, people are still playing it. I'd be playing it right now if I could be bothered to recover my savegames from my last harddisk upgrade (Steam version doesn't have cloud save, as I found out after the upgrade). I think we owe Valve (and to some degree Gog) a great deal of gratitude for making it possible for us to still be able to buy these games and play them on modern systems. Back when games came on physical media, once sales dropped below a certain amount, it was no longer financially sound to keep pressing more discs. It was no longer financially sane for shops to keep them on their limited shelf space either, since that space would be better used for the newer games that were still in their peek-sales stage. So games were only available for a relatively brief period until the remaining copies ended up in the bargain bin. This meant no more sales, and therefore, no more updates to keep it compatible with newer operating systems either. But with digital distribution, there's no great cost associated with selling more copies. Which has led to games remaining on the platform, and receiving occasional bugfix/compatibility updates, since they still sold enough to make that small investment of developer time worth it.
Unrealistic expectations. Single player games will last a short time but be fun. Multiplayer games usually die a few weeks after launch as they are boring.
Some of the best and most addicting games I've played recently have been single player Indie games. Valheim, Dyson Sphere Program, Dawn of Man, Kingdoms Reborn, etc. Valheim is an example of a game that peaked huge and dropped off, but that doesn't mean the game is still great. There's literally 1000s of mods for the game and they're being pumped out every week. What keeps me from playing games for extended periods of time has to do more with the social aspect of things.
Totally and they are solid into web3 gaming, just look at defimons who is almost ready... owning our assets and the community controlling the game economy is the future
I believe gamers in general are feeling a form of fatigue and are spiritually hungry for something more fulfilling. This is why I feel that gamers(myself included) find themselves going from game to game, searching for something that can hold our interest and attention. I have stage 3 cancer and I've found myself reflecting more on how I spend my time. I've made a conscious decision to step away from playing as many game and spend time with my family, my dogs and being engaged with the world as much as possible. If you find yourself constantly searching for the next game, not really finding anything to hold your interest, or just searching for that feeling you used to get while immersed in a game. Try going for a walk, take your dog if you have one. If you have family around you ask them to go with you or watch a movie together. Find some time to engage with them and connect. Life is fleeting, as much as I love gaming it's not what we should focus our time on. Then, when you have that time. Gaming will be that much more enjoyable again. Good luck to those on the search, and God bless.
This makes "go outside and touch some grass" not just a meme insult. I wish you the best on your health dude. It doesn't take cancer for gamers to feel this way. You can see the restlessness and dissatisfaction in the numbers.
I think there's a lot of subjectivity when it comes to the world of gaming and what is truly constituted as "dead." In the world of a live-service driven ecosystem I can certainly see the sentiment of a dead game being more applicable, since if that game truly does lose player count then that company will likely see lower sales due to no one purchasing their in-game merch. On the other hand, we're now seeing a resurgence of retro games and being an 80s baby, growing up around rental shops like Blockbuster, Roger's Video, Microplay, etc, these once "dead" titles are being revived in a lot of ways due to many people wanting to relive those moments. I agree that once you've completed a game, unless there's some massive replay value in it, you're likely going to put it down and move on. Does that equate to a dead game? Absolutely not, since you've pretty much invested all that you could and received your money's worth.
I feel like most games have turned into jobs. You put so much time into a game and its like wow. I want something with a good story that has me coming back. Just me though.
As someone that have been playing gachas for long, I can say that I treat then as a routine. Or I do play it everyday on point or I don't play it. I do have a Wii and I used to play it a lot and I still know what fun used to be, and the games I played didn't forced me to get into a routine or do a event daily without missing. Pure fun, I can say. Games lost the "Fun" factor... I'm still sticking up for the gaming industry, even that I'm getting older, because I'm a hopeful type person, and I never make predictions of the mystery that is the world we live in.
Concurrent player counts matter in multiplayer games, especially those that require a minimum amount of players to start a game, as this drastically increases lobby wait times. This becomes even more important when you're playing a multiplayer game with an elo or ranking system that needs to match players of similar skill level in the same lobby, such as RTS.
Player count really matters in multiplayer. If I q up for a match and have to wait 15 minutes to find an opponent, I'll play 1 match instead of 3, then move on to a game where it doesn't take as long. Also, it feels bad to hear that the promises the devs made get pulled. In singleplayer I really couldn't care less, but I do have concerns my favourite online game could be getting shut down in a few years, and that bothers me.
Also with lower player count the lobbies get very painful because is either a sweat fest or a noob stomp because the algorithm doesn’t have enough to pool from. This makes the gameplay worst lowering the player count and making the problem even worst.
Player counts should only really matter for online multiplayer games. As someone in Australia multiplayer games can quickly die off. I cant play DUOs in Apex for example because there are not enough people playing that mode. One of the reasons I mainly stick to Co-op PVE games or Singe player.
Yep, love living in Australia but this is one downside. Hear people saying older multiplayer games are active but when I check they're dead and takes forever to find a match. Thing is i wouldn't mind high ping but multiplayer games try very not to pair people with high ping so being in Australia means finding no matches.
I quit Apex. Played it since day 1, it was always the same repetitive content over and over with 1 or 2 big changes and then the gun meta being changed. Boring, repetitive and not really a challenge. Oh God and the bugs... Same old bugs every season taking weeks, months, if not years to fix. That's also why I think games have taken a huge hit.
Losing a player base is a sign of something... Whether it be that the company fucked up in the extreme, another game came out, a global pandemic, etc, you can't judge the QUALITY of that game for you personally on it, you can't with any game, or anything at all for that matter... It DOES NOT however correlate that gaming is dying BECAUSE OF that reason... Gaming IS dying... Gaming USED to be profitable because it was GOOD, now 'micro' transactions exist, loot boxes, etc, THOSE have RUINED gaming... So YES, gaming IS dying, but not because their playerbase LEFT, because the playerbase will continue to NOT COME BACK due to bullshit the companies are doing to nickel and dime a PLAYER... We're customers now, not players, not gamers, not fans, just however much money we can drop is what they're aiming for...
I really loved this video because it takes the time to acknowledge both why we SHOULD and SHOULD NOT focus on player counts. They do paint a picture of what a game is doing, but in a lot of cases, it doesn't paint the ENTIRE picture. Elden Ring being a perfect example, like you said. One of the best games of the year, an easy classic for years to come...but it's also crushingly difficult, and I don't blame a single person, especially those who LOVED it, to get to the end and go, "PHEW, done with this now, can't wait to put this down and play something EASY for a change." Great game, but player counts dropping should be EXPECTED! Putting it down when a person gets to the end doesn't mean it was bad. Even in live service games and MMOs, especially ones that are free to play, peak player counts will ALWAYS be high, as truckloads of people will install, jump in, try it out, and a ton of folks will say "eh, this isn't for me, gonna play something else." We only have so much money to spend on games, as well as time to play the ones we enjoy. But, that said...if a live game has a sizable budget, both for development AND maintenance, and only has 5-10 players logging in every day...the game ends up being not profitable enough to keep alive, and may get shut down. Player counts do matter, but ebbs and flows occur.
To the contrary, I think this video suggests why we ought not to focus on player counts. But rather consider them carefully after we've spent some time to consider what the player counts might actually mean, instead of what we think they might mean.
I agree it's very confusing to me why I see some people making a big deal of Elden Ring's player numbers when it's mostly a singleplayer experience. Of course the playerbase is going to keep declining when people start finishing the game or quit after getting stuck. I don't know why playerbase even matters for a game you're going to be buying to play alone for the most part.
The argument for elden ring is exactly how I feel. I feel like it is one of the best games I've played in the last decade. I put 120 hours into it at launch without touching anything else. I only have 2-3 hours at most a day to play so thats a lot for me. Im playing other games now but if/when they drop a DLC you bet your ass I'm dropping literally everything until the DLC is finished
PoE dev Chris Wilson have said in a interview with Josh Strife Hayes, that 10.000 concurrent players should be enough to keep a MMORPG going if they are doing it right. PoE planned for 10.000 and have about 70-80.000 players, so they are running a successful Game in their opinion.
I miss the days where I can buy a complete game that isn't reliant on constant patches or a service controlled by the developers. One of the reasons why Skyrim still goes strong is because its pretty much updated by the community and the base game allows for so much to be expanded on.
Skyrim has had a lot of patches and very much needs a lot more, Bethesda just doesn't care enough to make them. It's one of the worst example you could have chosen.
I think a better example would be a fighting game like Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Was put out over 20 years ago and is still a game that I see gets lots of play today.
@@MerlinTheCommenter True, MvC 2 has had a lot of mileage, but it should also be noted that the game is Recycle City: There's like... 5 new spritesets or so in that game, tops. All the other characters are reused wholesale from previous games, so it's a game from a very different era. Last time they tried to make a new game that leaned heavily on reused assets was Marvel vs Capcom Infinite... and we all know how that ended. It just doesn't work out the same these days.
In my humble opinion what happened to the industry here is: when games where awesome and had an attached online viability some gamers complained that the online aspect of these games were lacking. They listened to the few and went balls to the wall with it and now this is the result. My question is how big is the online community for Minecraft for example, and from those sales what percentage is online being used? I think any company that focuses on no online aspect games will make a killing because lately I’ve been playing a lot of single player games, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m sure I represent a good percentage of gamers out there.
Yep. When I see what should be a single player game with an online requirement I give it a pass every time because I know the single player will be about 6 hours or so of content and then nothing to do at all. Games used to have 40+ hours of content for single player and we need to go back to that. Removing the mix is a good step forward on that.
Yup. Literally same thing happened with Warhammer 3 Total War. As apart of Sega’s overall marketing scheme they are trying to push online of those games to detriment of single player experience, both game wise and as a consumer(streamers etc getting early access while you’re a paying customer waiting on an update just a bad approach overall for any marketing id argue) Reality is, go look at either coop or versus lobbies and like, maybe 5-10 games open right, total war games always been niche so typically have like 5000-10000 players but like…they’re obviously not playing multiplayer…but ya…keep pushing that angle of the game as if it’s a demographic even exists…mind blowing cos this started years ago but still being used as if was ever a successful marketing tool Online games do well for a lot of variables, and so single player games, trying to push two into same consumer sphere is just mental tho as all very opposing variables in the end
This honestly reminded me of alot of things I forgot about…I’ve been thinking about why games seem like they aren’t fun anymore/the developers not having a good relationship with the consumers
True 2 very good points here. The golden age of games is over? Think about how much better generally/over all/ more consistently games were from say 2000-2015 or 2020. We need more soul and love in gaming today. Artistic truth etc
Couldn’t agree more with what was said about dedicating your life to a game. I used to be really into fighting games but I don’t want to spend my time dedicating my life to one game and miss out on so many great titles. I feel as a gamer it’s best to really dive in and experience as many as I can.
Yes, I dont want to live the game. Game is free time for me after work. I dont want to spend so much time learning new things, I use my brainpower at work, I dont want to waste it with game.
Many years ago I had seen a article about how the average age of a PC gamer was 32. For some reason the gaming industry keeps aiming their products at 15 year olds. On top of that, it is really easy to stay in contact with your games community today, much easier than it has ever been but game companies seem to go out of their way to REFUSE to give the player what they request. Usually, they seem to only give players what they ask for when there is an added fee. There has been a race to the bottom and cheap, ugly cell phone games probably didn't help because we went from World/Universe creating games to Battle Royal Cartoons. The gaming industry, just like the movie industry, they both deserve a massive collapse but, it's not like most people are going to start reading. It really too bad because I know I am a adult with no kids and money to throw at a worthwhile game but I guess people like me will have to keep our money. I don't think players see dropping player number counts as a reason to not play a game, I think we often see it as vindication for already coming to the conclusion that a game sux. We are constantly pounded by people being paid to TELL us what is GREAT! and more often than not, they are always grossly over exaggerated. When a game gets so big and popular that pop culture is making tv shows about people playing that game or jokes about in-game material, that's when a game has reached the same height as World of Warcraft in it's prime. I think the pop in popularity on many of these games shows a desperation by the audience for a great game. FPS can be fun and are good to play with friends but they don't have the longevity of a MMORPG. FPS are also much cheaper to make, it comes back to profit and the short term gain. All a developer has to do is basically make a Unreal Engine 5 rehash of World of Warcraft and it would be a hit. They wouldn't need much innovation or creativity, just a detailed environment and some new lore. Stay connected with the audience and release additional content every 3 months. Paid in-game purchases should only be cosmetic or quality of life improvements. As long as the animation is not anime or overly cartoonish and the environment is not constantly gloomy, this game would succeed very quickly and have potential for a decade of sales IMO.
Alot of Valve games have amazing longevity. Counter Strike. Dota. Team Fortress. L4D. I think something that helps keep a game alive is how much access the community has to the game. Stuff like mod support. Community servers. Unofficial patches. Etc. Look at games like Fallout or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. These are games kept alive because there is a community to create content for it that keeps it alive.
Great video! This is a topic my friends and I go back and forth on and when I was younger mmos were my favourite games to play but player count is so important because certain content is unplayable without people. I’ve started to go back to play solo player games. I don’t know what the answer for only online games but at least with single player only, I know that my fun is in my hands not in the need of others.
I miss games that lasted 4, 5 or 6+ years. I personally think hyper competitiveness and obsession with esports is killing off gaming for anyone who doesn't want to sit at their desk 12 hours a day. Its turned gaming into a thing where people watch it like its the nfl, not something normal people actually play often.
It has nothing to do with pvp and esport. There is a huge community for single player games. It comes from companies trying to make their bucks efficiently, late game asks for a lot of ressources and having millions of monthly paid subscribers is very hard to do.
You don't need to sit at your desk playing Starcraft (even the good ol' Brood War isn't dead) 12 hours a day. It's all about who you play with. If you've never played, then go grab 5 friends that have never played and you can have a blast playing 3v3 with each other and keep switching up the teams. That people play competitively has little bearing on how you and your friends need to play. We don't feel like we need to drive all day just because Nascar and F1 exist. We don't stop playing sports just because people watch them. There are plenty of people that will go down to the park and play basketball once a week AND watch an NBA game once a week without those two things having much bearing on each other. Some other people only watch, and others only play without watching the NBA at all.
Thats really up to you, plenty games hold value years later. Might not be your style but GTA is a PERFECT example, they are still putting out new content regularly to a game thats 10+ years old. At the end of the day tho not every game has that option, to be a game people play for years on end. Only some stories/playstyles will fit that and make sense, other stories are done when they are done, for me personally The Last of Us was one of the most boring games i have ever played and the world LOVES it. Part of it is the game, the rest is on us as players to decide what we want to replay, because technically they can all be replayed as many times as we want.
I think greed of the investors (the suits) and the lack of heart/talent from a lot of developers now days are the reason for so many declines. I think it just comes down to they don’t make them like they used to.
It's not the lack of heart. It's the lack of leadership/backbone. Project managers in IT have either no technical background, or they bend their knee to budgeting/the customer and abandon good software principles. Think about it. Most tech savvy people are introverts and shy conflict. Although I think this might be slowly changing. Being a nerd is not a niche anymore.
Firefall was a great game with a lot of neat systems and cool story. I enjoyed all my time I spent in it. I never feel like I waste time in a game as long as I enjoyed the time I was there.
Too bad Red 5 Studios themselves were a bit of a shitshow. I believe their lack of organisation and overall ability to pick a direction was what killed them and the game. I don't regret time spent having fun in that game, I do wish, however, that the game was still around.
Did FIrefall actually ever release? I seem to remember logging into a beta that i backed cus i was pumped for the game but there never seemed to be anything to do so i would log out again.
As someone who started playing Darkage of Camelot in 2006, and logged on to the live servers as recently as 2022. All these games you've mentioned are thriving.
I think it comes down to saturation. You can really only master one MMO at a time due to the learning curves, grind required, and necessity to establish yourself in a guild or group to get anywhere decent. The answer to this is having some of the largest studios band together and create one TRUE massive MMORPG. Each studio contributes to different game mechanics, and maybe leads up the creative on different DLCs. Otherwise, people move around, they go where their friends go, and since the game market doesn't limit how many of these games can exist, it's hard to find "your" game sometimes when you find a good one but too many people leave and it becomes a barren wasteland of trolls and bots.
I fully agree. I am very hopeful for the riot MMO as they seem to be able to pull off making a version of a game and it being popular and even making popular multiplayer games like LoL, Valorant, TFT, LoR etc. If they can manage to pull of a great MMO, I can see it become the go to MMO for a lot of people and with its established stories and world already in existence and the connection people will have to the world after playing Valorant or LoL, I can see it being as big as if not bigger than WoW.
@@Sharigloo true, and definitely not Meta's metaverse, which would be littered with pay schemes. But something where multiple companies handle different aspects. This is definitely not the best example but think of a mall, it's one mall but a bunch of stores, and the success of each store actually depends on the success of all the other stores to keep the mall open, thriving, and populated, so their motivation to work together would be legit. But with all of those different companies, updates would definitely require some sort of offlining/onlining persistence management server that could hot-swap out parts without effecting the others. You're right that there's not (that I know of) the tech for this type of hot-swapping fractional persistent universe, but I'm sure 50 years down the road there will be tech we never dreamed of, built & programmed by A.I. most likely.
This vision of a multi-IP mega game is what the “metaverse” is supposed to be. Facebook/Meta will not be the ones in control of the metaverse. Their Horizon Worlds app looks horrible, gimmicky mandatory VR with motion controls, ripoff Mii avatars, and PS2 quality graphics.
@@jakejennings1639 Yeah the flight model was awesome, even the combat was perfectly okay just sad there was no real content at the end and the items were boring. They could have invested time to rebirth it easily in a few months but that AAA mindset is damn stupid most of the time.
I mean, for Elden Ring it makes sense, it's a single player game and most if not all Achievements can be gotten in one playthrough if you back up the save file. So it make sense that once everyone experienced the game, and done all they could, all that would be left would be modders, people who pvp, people who want to try all the mods coming out, people who want to do all the sidequests, and people who want to find all secrets and lore in the game.
I truly appreciate calling out the fact that the games that had strong starts doesn't mean that they are dead after a decline. I have seen too many great under rated games being removed. It isn't like we have the cartridges to allow for some of us to go back and play older games. Gaming has changed a lot over the years and I am worried that this kind of focus on player numbers will only hurt gamers of the younger generation by missing out. I don't even know if it is worth being a game collector in today's day and age
As a player of Runescape for 17 years, I can say that if I panicked every time I saw a sustained drop in concurrent players, I would have stress-induced ulcers permanently. I think Concurrent player counts simply shouldn't be the end all and be all of how well a game is doing.
The often overlooked thing in these sorts of discussions is the size of the industry itself. Video games only really entered the mainstream around 2006, at which point, it's consumer base exponentially increased in size. What this means, in general terms, is that prior to 2006, more dedicated hobbyist (what you might call "hardcore" players" made up a much larger percentage of players than the do in 2022. The current market is dominated by casual players who typically have tend to have markedly different consumption habits. You also have to consider that this massive influx of consumers developed an entirely different set of expectations and tendencies than their predecessors. Take the whole "games as service" model, for example. Kids who started really getting into games via consoles in the late 2000s early 2010s have little to no point of reference for how - say - online multiplayer games were traditionally conducted. Community servers and custom content weren't really something these kids had experience with as console games tended to favour curated developer content and matchmaking systems. The rapid acceptance of microtransactions (cosmetic ones in particular), games as service practices and other such things isn't really all that hard to wrap your head around when almost two generations worth of people grew up with them and consider them "normal". The same could be said about spending only a month with any given game, as the luxury of hundreds of new, easily accessible games is a relatively new development.
Nah, gaming went mainstream way before that, Halo: Combat Evolved, introduced competitive FPS gaming to a new generation of casual gamers all over the world.
@@johnirby8847 Quake 2 did not popularize competitive shooters on consoles. That was my point. PC gaming was still a niche scene at that time. I'm in the back half of my forties. I've been gaming since it started.
@@johnirby8847 totally. But if you compare player numbers of the most popular PC MP FPS games of that time and compare those to the numbers of Halo, it's pretty clear that game really broke gaming out to a far broader, more casual audience and in a big way.
It’d be cool to see a video on seasonal gaming declines. I feel like gaming always declines a bit in June-September because no new games really come out in this timeframe and people are usually doing more outside stuff (at least in the US)
I agree. From my long time experience it always seems like things start to really pick back up around Halloween and even more as the Holidays approach.
I think that's an awesome distinction you made where a game being "dead" actually matters. In most cases it doesn't except for online-only games as a service. That's where a game dying really means something because when it does die, the server's gone and players can literally never play again. RIP Marvel Heroes Omega 😢
Several years ago a new MMO came out called Age of Conan. I was still in my gaming prime at the time and joined a PVP guild prior to its release. With pre-order the game was giving you early access. I think it was three days if memory serves. This guild I had joined setup a roster. You could put your name down and be teamed up. The goal was to get as far as possible before the actual release day. The guild leaders were very open. They weren't going to stop playing for the entire early access and I didn't take them seriously. I had to work the day the game went into early release. I figured I jump on after work, game all night, and catch up as teams shut down. By the time I got online we already had teams into the mid 20s and 30s. We literally had teams who did not stop playing for two days. Literally stayed gaming online leveling with the exception of short breaks. By the time the game released we already had teams at max level. And in that game there was only one zone you could go to to get the final levels to reach cap. And my PVP guild was right there waiting on you to pop in. And it was brutal. Everybody and anybody who wasn't guild and showed up in zone was KOS. It was so bad that guild members like myself who were behind the curve was openly targeted because of the guild association. When I finally made max level it was nonstop PVP. It was basically my guild against the entire server in this zone. Within about three weeks from date of official release we already had members saying they were moving on to their next game. By the first month the guild was all but dead. I lasted another month before I bailed on the game too. Was it a bad game? it had its points. But this game released without any real end game raiding content. So you either PVPed or you crafted. There really wasn't anything else. And after PVPing for hours every day you eventually just grew tired of it. And I'd be lying if I didn't say my guilds overly aggressive PVP stance probably caused premature number counts as players struggled to complete their final levels and also not having PVE raid content to tackle either. Why stick around in a game you are not enjoying? These days every MMO seems to have the same business model. Micro-transactions. Most aren't required. But eventually you realize you want any chance to stay competitive you have to do micro-transactions. Whether it is because of gear or resources to make gear that simply aren't available other than as limited quest rewards. Now I also hear rumors of GTA getting neutered. That it simply isn't the same game as its predecessors and is even targeted towards a different audience. And yeah, this is taking its toll on the gamers too. But here is something else. I have games on my phone. Some of them have short sessions. Got five minutes to kill? Jump on the game on the cell phone. That leads to even less time on the consoles as I focus on just leveling up in the cell phone app game. Part of the problem is that there are too many options for everyone. And you simply give it up.
@@Spectreofwar i wish that game would come back...i would even pay a $20 month subscription fee if i had too..that was my main game....i need that back really badly.
I think that we can look at the increase of live service titles as a contributing factor to the decline of game sales. There are not enough new titles coming out because developers and publishers are wanting to make a game that will stay relevant and produce money for them 5 to 10 years down the road
I feel like the big issue is that live service games at launch are pretty much betas until the devs decide to actually add more stuff. Like, I haven't played a SINGLE live service game that felt completed at launch. They either don't have enough content, mechanics aren't rewarding enough and require literal hours do perform anything meaningful, or it's just straight up broken to begin with. The only game this year that felt complete for me personally was Elden Ring, which isn't a live service game. It's all there right from the gate, what you saw in the trailer for the game is what you get, and it doesn't try to be something it isn't. The devs knew that most people were going to do 1 or 2 playthroughs and then stop, and that's not an issue, because they take pride in the world they created, rather then being hyperfixated on min/maxing profits, unlike other games that shan't be named *cough* any game with battlepass bs *cough*
I think what it comes down to is higher expectations plus lower attention spans. Also people are followers, if a game starts losing players others will follow. And playing a game, ESPECIALLY on PC (if it’s a pvp game) that has low playercounts brings higher chances of running into cheaters, some games with server lists don’t have this issue as bad as those that don’t. And lastly, overall popularity and streamers/content creators have an influence that’s growing day by day. I still like to go on older games like older cod games or battlefield games just to see what’s going on and i ALWAYS run into cheaters sometimes right away.
One more reason playercount decline: player skill. The longer a game is on the market, the better players get on average. But this also forms a barrier for new players, who might just not have fun playing at that skill level from the get go. Not everyone enjoys a game when loosing 20 times in a row quickly, without a chance to improve.
I find overall higher skill levels of players makes games less enjoyable. Everything just devolves into minmaxing and metagaming. I still remember the League of Legends beta days lol. Everyone was just doing stupid crap and had very little idea what to do and it was a blast.
Im bronze 5 in Heroes of the Storm, I just dont want to learn all heroes, because I dont want to invest the time for it. I just play for fun. But many players are dedicate to it. Its relax for me after Im tired from work, nothing else.
I have played over 1000 hours in Planetside 2 over the last 4 years. The playercount on this massive game rarely exceeds a few thousand. Yet, this community has become so close, every vet knows each other by name. (not usually for good reasons though lol) I would dump another 1000 hours into it even with as few players there are. Some games transcend the playercount argument by the most ridiculous of ways. TF2 is a prime example
I think what we're really seeing is that there are more games and potential experiences than ever before. When a game is released, numbers are high at first because people want to try something new, but, ultimately, they disperse to their favorite titles.
In my view this is true to a degree, I think it's more to do with how we discover new games these days, streaming... there's tons of people watching their favorite streamers playing the newest Early Access games on a daily basis for a week or two, maybe even just a couple of days, and then they move on to the next popular game to keep their viewers interested, sure there's streamers that play only a few games all the time, but they usually don't have the viewer counts as the ones that keep trying new games as soon as they can, again there are exceptions, and this creates a batch of other streamers to switch to the new game that the top 5 streamers are playing because then they themselves might get a boost in viewers.
I also think the trend is bigger than just concurrent player count. It's much easier these days to find a community to share your experience with, but that means a large community will see what you share and comment on it. Some positive, some negative. For some games, the min/max theory is done by "expert players", providing a template for other players to follow, unless they want to play more inefficiently than the rest, possibly stamping them as "bad players". This is especially true for the automation/base building genres (Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program etc). Even RPGs have it all figured out and the community having all this shoved in their faces the moment they enter said community. There isn't a lot of room for experimentation because people will tell you when you're being "bad". I believe this hurts retention and joy. I certainly am constantly tempted at learning the "correct" way to play, since I often fall into the trap that I know the "real solution" is out there and I feel stubborn for not wanting to seek it out. This goes hand in hand with concurrent player counts, as people will see it as a metric for other people's joy of the game, and if they aren't enjoying it, they certainly can't as well. We're not open to the experience at hand, unless we have curators telling us what is fun or not, and concurrent players seems to be a data curator of fun-ness or "relevance"
I don't know how the experience is for a lot of other people but I know that when I stopped playing wow so much I had a lot more time to go back and play the single player story driven games that grinding constantly on wow kept me from trying out and I gotta say I really really enjoyed getting a chance to do that. Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Cyberpunk, Jedi Fallen Order, Death Stranding, Resident Evil Village. So many games that I missed out on over the years for the sake of neverending grinding in one game that just really isn't that fun anymore. I still like Battlefront 2 but haven't been able to play it in awhile due to current setup limitations. Playing sitting ten feet away from a 65 inch tv in my living room isn't really conducive to playing those kinds of games well.
@@bahhumbug5467 I never played part 1 but 2 was incredible. Insanely immersive at 4k. I'm partway through death stranding and assassins creed black flag right now lol
@@patrickmcgovern4004 if you have a pc or something I really reccomend it the undead nightmare mode is so cool. Is death stranding fun? I’ve had it for awhile but it got so boring for mee
@@bahhumbug5467 I'm coming back to it after talking a break for awhile. Got better when I got to the point where you can get vehicles so you move a little faster and aren't constantly having to work at keeping your balance. I've got a 5600x/3070ti pc. 4k 60fps is doable in almost every game I've played on it.
So true.. Shamefully I admit I am addicted to League (LoL), same map, same champs, same play style, samrle grind, same frustrations, 8-12 hrs a day before. One day I just didn't felt playing and tried an indie game I bought, IT WAS THE BEST FEELING EVER since the day I started playing video games. I didn't realize at the time that too much of one game is unhealthy, you forget the joy of just playing A Game for Fun. I still like League but I'm not gonna waste a day or even my off time just to feel frustrated after a match. Sometimes I have withdrawals when I don't play League for a period of time and honestly to me its fine, I'm just not bothered wholly if I loose a match. At the end of the day, if its FUN then I play if it isn't I find others to replace it. Also I'm backed up on Indie games and I don't the time to play them all, I'm getting too old for this and I'm still in my mid 20s.
I feel like there is something missing in this analysis: Hype and Twitch. If a game is hyped up one might give it a try even though it's not really for that person. In that case her/she will drop the game rather early because it either isn't really their cup of tea or because the next big hype came along. I feel like Twitch has put this hype cycle on steroids over the last few years with streamers constantly chasing the next hype because it gets them views or they got sponsored to play it and viewers getting influenced to play a game because all the streamers playing it. Don't have numbers to back anything of that up though.
In my experience, I have almost never come across a truly "dead" game. I mostly play older games because of my shitty laptop and personal preference and even with games that are over 10 years old there are still people playing. To be fair, the vast majority of games I play are single player and when I do play multiplayer it is with specific friends in private lobbies so it doesn't matter how many other people are playing (there are always other lobbies too though). It really hurts my soul to see how disgustingly corporate gaming has become. It's supposed to be just a fun hobby, but God forbid everything we enjoy isn't milked to the last cent by people who have zero passion for what they are producing, but as long as it makes them money they will keep shitting it out en masse. There are thankfully lots of (usually) smaller devs out there that still make games for gamers by gamers, it is unfortunately very clear that gaming has been claimed by greed and it shows in both the types of games that are being produced as well as the people that are playing them.
@@SirCanuckelhead _Some_ games were made by gamers for gamers. There has always been games made by overworked devs for suits in an office going back all the way to the Atari days. The only real difference these days is that a couple of guys in a garage can't compete with hundred-million-dollar AAA budgets. But if you (the player) are willing to forego the photorealistic graphics and effects that's expected from the AAA studios, there are still great games - likely hundreds if not thousands - produced every year by independent studios. We get more great games in a year now than we got in the entire decade of the 1990s, simply because there's a lot more developers out there doing great things. The converse of course is that we also get a lot more utter horse shit every year now, because 80% of everything is crap and that ratio doesn't deviate much no matter how you define "everything". But unfortunately we don't get any more time in a day, so several times more games at that 80% ratio means several times more opportunity to find the crap games instead of the gems, given the same (relatively) fixed amount of time we have available. So we rely on reviews and player counts and Steam recommendations and whatever other metadata to try and narrow the field of possibilities and hope that we find a game we like out of that pseudo-curated list. But lets say you insist on sticking with the AAAs. Are you doomed to terrible games forever? Well no, not really. 80% of everything is crap, including AAA games. That means 20% are not crap. That may not mean great - could just mean passable, but a few will be great games. So how to identify those? Well for starters, just ignore the peak concurrent players. Its a stupid metric. Every AAA game gets hyped to shit, and any game that gets hyped to shit will have an initial massive spike whether it deserves to have one or not. What you really want to look at is the player base _after_ the initial spike has hit and crashed. And even then you want to look more at the _stability_ of the player base than the absolute count (though the latter isn't entirely irrelevant). A game that has 10k on a near-constant basis for months at a time is likely going to be better than a game that runs 5k most of the time even if it spikes to 50k for a couple weeks every three months (indicates they have a rapid but ultimately kind of weak patch cycle). Another hint: Just ignore gacha. There are a lot of games out there that are monetized via a gacha system which turns a lot of people off. But if you can restrain yourself from playing that lottery, a lot of them are actually quite good in their own right. Of course if you don't have the self-control to avoid the gacha then you're SoL so YMMV on that one. (Same goes for any microtransactions really. Gacha is just the most generally aggressive and annoying form that tries to abuse people with gambling addictions, if not generate them.)
@@altrag If there was a way for every gamer who found the best indie experience of their life to donate along the lines of several hundred quid to their favorite dev it would revolutionize the industry overnight. Yet today we have multiple high profile completely gratis successes with the devs receiving nothing back but 'positive word of mouth'. As if that pays their bills.
@@jshtng78 "Several hundred quid" is rather uncommon, but we do have a way for every gamer to "donate" to the devs - its called purchasing the game. I have no idea what you're referring to when you speak of "high profile completely gratis successes". If you mean free-to-p(l)ay then sure those exist, but those aren't "completely gratis" by any stretch of the imagination. Even if _you_ play without ever paying a single dime, it just means you're being subsidized by some whale somewhere. The F2P business model is (intentionally) rather complicated in the vast majority of cases, but it works _really, really_ well. Especially the models that include some form of loot boxes or gacha mechanic to hook into that gambling mindset. There's a reason why so many companies are going F2P despite being "completely free" in theory. Of course if you don't mean F2P then I have no idea what you're referring to. Maybe you're in a niche and have a different idea of "high profile" than I do, but I can't think of many games of any profile that are completely free. A few, but not many. And most of those few are tiny experimental things that the dev just didn't think they'd make money on anyway. Some are actually not bad, but hardly what anyone would classify as "high profile".
@@altrag Oh but that's where you're wrong. You do not need any expensive investment or large team to create a good game. Minecraft is the best example of that (which beat GTA V by almost a hundred million). You can find countless good games made my small teams, I stopped buying AAA garbage years ago, all I buy these days are promising indie titles, or the few exceptional AAA games. All you REALLY need is a good game. AAA does not offer you good games, they offer you good looking games (very few rare exceptions of both good looking and good game). What you need is a creative mind and the right people to bring it to reality. Chasing after trends like "I'll make the WoW killer" or "my game will be the next PUGB" or "I'll make a better Minecraft" or whatever. It's all worthless to chase after a trend. If you want to make something good, you need to be the start of a trend.
I love this type of videos that do a deep dive into a specific pattern in the gaming industry, and you've done a fantastic job in this one. I'd love to hear your thoughts on hacking in games as well, considering how much of an issue it has become in recent times.
Boting is a worse issue. Hacking can be mitigated or stopped with server restrictions. But botting...is impossible to eliminate, it's a constant battle and does far more damage long-run than hacking.
@@joshanonline I don't see how you can prevent hacking via the server at all. If you want to understand why it's nearly impossible, watch the recent video Garbaj made on this topic. We're heading in a direction where hacks will become completely undetectable by software. And that, IMO, is much worse than bots.
@Qettesh I didn't mean for him to analyze why humans do it. I'm just curious about his perspective on how that will change the gaming industry in the future, and explore any ideas on how to combat it.
@Qettesh you shouldn't be surprised, because it's still a $300+ billion industry. Anything that rakes in that much money will be sustainable, at least for a while.
Enjoyed the intelligent overview -- as you say, it's possible to really love a game but still not want to play it every day forever after. As the saying goes, "Too much of anything, by definition, is still too much". I wonder if we'll eventually see some kind of shift back toward more finite, "one and done" games, with the very popular ones spawning a series of finite sequels? I guess we'll find out ...
There are many new games that have 'amazing' graphics. But, I'm still sticking to Banished, DW8XL, and Minecraft just because of its non-existent endgoal and no competition. Just play whenever I want. Sometimes I play 15 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes, and sometimes can even more than 4 hours (If I do have the time) And that is where the problem comes. Most of new games recently put an emphasis to FOMO and competition. Making the player stressed out and not having fun. There is a study that even said that some hardcore gamers got a burnout/phobia to their "fav" Games.
It's really hard being a modern gamer when you grew up in the 90's. The industry doesn't even look the same anymore. Now, majority of games have paid dlc and MTX. I can't help but feel that anyone who spends money on MTX are getting ripped off because games in the past never had cash shops. Everything was included in the price of the game. If a game I want to play has MTX I don't play it. If everyone did the same we wouldn't have MTX and our hobby would be in a much better place.
This is fully correct. I am a old school gamer, I play ty the Tasmanian tiger. Rocket power Beach bandits, blood Rayne, all kind of shit. I full on agree with you, today's games are being monetized hard as hell... I knew games were going to hell when cyberpunk 2022 failed. People don't understand that this game was being made during the golden age of gaming. And was ruined because of how ambitious it was, leading the investors to force the game to come out early, agianst the fans and devs wishes. Absolutely sad. I'm gonna be a trucker soon, so this shit is whatever at this point.
I think it's actually a much bigger problem in general. Everything 'has to be' measured that eventually leads to a bunch of vanity metrics. It obscures what really matters and it basically impedes the growth/development of a product. I've seen this multiple times in my workplace (startup company) and I can see this happening in other industries.
@@JackTGreat Ditto. Vanity Metrics made a job at a bank I had as a network guy impossible to do because they implemented buncha crap to keep track of meaningless metrics and shit so the management team could pretend, looking at this data, that they knew what was going on....they DIDNT! None of Management could do OUR jobs so they should just be happy we outperform their expectations. They implemented a reporting system that made something that might take 100 mouse clicks turn into 1,500 mouse clicks. "ITS ALL ABOUT CLICKING, MAN!" As I said at a big meeting being they only one with balls to tell our bosses they made out jobs needlessly more difficult. Make everything more complicated and difficult for no reason, but expecting none of these changes to cause a slow down in productivity...That is pretty much every manager at any company big and corporate enough
I personally think these are the issues. 1) split screen is very rare, can't play with your friends or siblings on one TV 2) campaigns are becoming an after thought to the online play 3) lack of diversity with types. Computer gaming has way more options because small developers can take risks bigger studios can. I'd like to see xbox take more chances on the smaller devs. Even if they're download only. 4) voice acting really hasn't improved since original playstation days. I get that timing is less controllable in a game than say a movie....but that's why I think actors should pitch lines as if they're talking to the player rather than just reading lines.
I never play a game based on playercount. As long as I can play the game normally there's enough players for me. I don't care about how popular something is before I play it
Its not such a big deal for those kinda team deathmatch genre of games.. call of duty .. fortnite etcetera ... as long as you can que into a match .. those games play exactly the same . However for mmorpgs its vastly different , the game can sometimes cease to exist if thousands and thousands of players just quit. And it affects the world /economy
@@Jradz8709 yeah I would say that kinda lands on the side of not playing the game normally anymore, to be fair. It's just alot more impactful with big player count serves
I took a 2 year break from Elder Scrolls Online and just started playing again a couple weeks ago. I couldn't believe how populated the most common starting areas and mid level areas are (I know it has level scaling). Got right into some guilds and having a blast seeing so many players in every area of the game world.
I think part of the problem is the increased attention to how much money games make. Instead of the traditional they release a game, you buy the game, they release a sequel, etc. now games are much more microtransaction or subscription based so the game just gets hard to sustain for a lot of players especially if you’re just a casual gamer as an adult playing in our off time. It’s hard to justify a $15/month subscription for something like world of Warcraft when I don’t actually have that much free time to play it. So instead you play one game for several months and when it’s not justifying whatever you have to pay for it anymore you play something else
One thing not mentioned with the declining player count is the player experience in-game. A good example of this is New World. I jumped back in not too long ago after playing it a bunch on launch then leaving for various reasons. The game still has a lot of the aspects that I liked, and some of the ones that I didn't weren't as noticeable, but a big issue that I noticed quite fast is that the world was empty. Outside of the towns, I rarely ever saw another player. And for a lot of MMO style games, there not being anyone else around to play with or interact with causes the experience to degrade. A good example was a quest I was on to kill the big bad in a certain area. I tried, and failed, three times because I was unable to kill it alone, and that became an issue because there was no one to help. Local was dead, company was dead, region, and whatever else. So a game that is designed to be played with other people really sufferes when there's no other people to play it with.
Hey just commenting to remind you that you have free server transfer tokens and can go to a more populated server for free! Don’t waste your time on a dead server my dude trust me Ive been there it’s trash! Progression happens so much faster when there are people around to help you!
I can't speak for MMO's but honestly even then player count doesn't affect experience if lobbies can be consistently filled. I play several relatively obscure games that have a tiny player base in comparison, and I still manage to have a good time. Sometimes it doesn't even feel any different if there's a lot of loyalty from the game's players.
Another issue with MMOs is that because most of them are trying to sell you something ongoing other than the subscription, they inevitably attract scammers, farmers, botters, etc. The only MMO I've been a part of that hasn't been scummed up and ruined by these influences were probably WOW and LOTRO. I still remember the hype and excitement I had participating in ArcheAge's alpha, and the utter garbage it became on release due to scammers, botters, and company microtransaction decisions.
@@dg4720 Unless you're from Australia where all our servers have merged into 1 final server.. Sure we can transfer to a US server with population but it also comes with a ~ 250-270ms+ latency cost.
There's also the monetary aspect, many have a finite budget when buying games and with many games being live services the fear that a game will die quickly and force the player to find something else is an ever present thing.
Two things I want to bring up: 1. I have been playing New World again recently and honestly enjoying it a lot. Sure it's player count has gone down but there is more than enough people around for me to have found a great guild and just enjoy playing. Devs seem to be sticking with it so it will become a good MMO eventually just like ESO and ff14 which had rough launch or terrible even. 2. I wish more games did what Path of Exile does, the developers are aware people are not going to be playing their game everyday all year. Their focus on numbers and retention is how many people come back every league/patch (These happen every 3ish months). So I can play the crap out of POE for like a month and if I am done I do not feel like I am missing anything and know I can come back in 2 months for a new patch and there are no game systems trying to force me to keep playing.
Path of Exiles’ lazy game design of *revolving door META* is probably one of the _worst_ examples you could have picked. There are 483 gems in 3.16. *How much more bloat* does the game need when so many gems are _useless???_ *GGG created the problem of power creep* in the first place so they are constantly buffing and nerfing old stuff, and keep adding new stuff to bait people to keep coming back but the fundamental problems still remain: *GGG doesn’t respect your time.* Compare to free updates like _Terraria, Minecraft, Satisfactory_ where your progress isn’t lost on updates because some dev gets off on artificially increasing difficulty due to no life streamers whining the game is too easy. There are good games out there, Path of Exile just isn’t one of them.
@@MichaelPohoreski Depends on your definition of a good game. By your definition of a good game. All live service games are terrible. I think POE does respect my time. There are no daily login rewards, there is no endless loot grind like in MMO's where it could take you weeks or months to get the gear you want. I can get a character to endgame and "complete" to my satisfaction in a week. And then unless I want to try another build or have some goal to do I come back the next league for a fresh start which I look forward to. Also comparing POE to games like Terraria, Minecraft, and satisfactory is a bit odd. It is like saying That Chocolate donuts taste terrible because they are not like strawberries. They are sooooo different. They do have power creep but so does every other Online RPG Style game. Most other games just create a treadmill. So "Ope look a new raid in wow so now you can get to Gear score 700 instead of 600." I am not saying I dislike this system but it is not much better honestly in fact in some ways I would argue it is worse and lazy. Also you can play on standard where your progress is not lost. But If you have issues with POE's league system then honestly POE may not be the game for you. Same way how someone may not enjoy the endless loot treadmills that MMO's have they do not usually play those games.
@@truton1060 I've been playing PoE since Open Beta. Your statement "just play Standard" is utter nonsense. PoE's revolving door of lazy game design effects standard whether players want it or not. The passive skill trees, the Atlas, gems, and uniques items have been reset/nerfed *multiple times.* i.e. How many times has Spark been nerfed and buffed??? For the record I tend to agree that most live service games are terrible. There are exceptions such as Guild Wars 2. *GW2:* Expansions are additive. *WoW:* Expansions are subtractive. You missed the point to other games. Those games _do_ respect your time. PoE doesn't.
@@MichaelPohoreski I disagree, but it sounds like we are fundamentally different players. The revolving door meta is what I enjoy about POE. This last patch they did no changes and I played the least amount of last league than I have any league since I started playing 4-5 years ago. So you think it is bad but that is one of the things that keeps me coming back. So that "lazy game" Design revolving door is one of the main things that brings me back. It may be simple (I would not say lazy as game balance and design are hard) but it works for me. I have accepted that the ever changing Meta is a feature of POE and I enjoy it. Other games where nothing changes and the same builds are always played is just boring for me. But like I said we seem to be enjoy different things but just because you do not enjoy something does not mean it is bad. Like I do not enjoy GW2, I have tried to get into it at least 3-4 times but the character builds and playstyles are boring for me. Does that mean guild wars 2 has a bad system? No it is just not for me.
@@MichaelPohoreski If you're this bitter, you should consider not playing it any more. Like drinking from a dry well -- if the dopamine drip has tailed off, try something else.
I've recently switched to playing single player campaign games and really enjoy them. Trying to keep up with what weapons are meta or Trying to learn a new map is exhausting. I recently just downloaded all the splinter cell games and I'm having a blast.
I like what you're going for, but the key killer to most of these games is a combination of microtransactions being way too spendy, the devs taking way longer for updates than ever necessary, their reluctance to patch bugs, and them refusing to use better anticheat or actually personally review cheat submissions. for small, 5 people groups i understand most of this. but big companies have time and time again ripped that 90% of players off entirely.
one of the biggest reasons that many people seem to forget is that we live in an ever evolving world, so new games keep popping up and people just move on. compared to the 90's and early 2Ks era, there's usually a big gap between the current game and the next new game. now? not so much, you barely played it for a few months, then there's a news that a new online game is coming up.
Simple reason, single player games were always made to be played within a time frame, multiplayer games were usually played for 2-3 years after its release until a new game came out that would replace it. MMO were always the same from the beginning, they were long term games in a online world, some people technically kept playing because it was supported by content. However ever since steam started using statistic we assume there has been some issues, but it's not the case, there was just not enough data to back it up since mostly people were not connected online. Microtransaction and grinding has been something to keep people out of the game, either you pay more to have the content now to avoid grinding, or you grind to have something later on, and that stuff started with EA, 2K, ubisoft and then Fortnite came in and said hold up let me do this to a whole new level with a battlepass, paying 10-15$ for a month of two month to unlock cosmetic features, basically telling the player they reward you for playing the game on a daily basis or if you play it enough, however the issue I have with this is you are basically paying 120 to 180$ a year to play a game...... and its been lucrative that almost every game has had a version of that implemented it. Some single player games are still the most fun till this day and will forever be, because there isn't a grind or microtransaction that affect the gameplay, its only the multiplayer the aspect, I would rather much have a sinpler/coop player campaign than an multiplayer, the experience is not the same, if you play on PC we do not have an issue with games haha, its mostly on console! So the only decline i can see and it make sens will be multiplayer games.
First, Fortnite didn't create that "whole new level thing with the battlepass", WoW had that and the numbers behind it a decade before Fortnite was even a thing. Fortnite and Minecraft had/have the advantage of being on nearly every platform, mobile, console, pc....and also a format with a very low barrier of entry that made it possible for kids to play as well. As far as PC vs Console, they have different player bases, and there are some conversions as people become more serious about their gameplay...games like Division 2 that has seen a huge decline, mostly because of other titles with better PVP, but there has been a considerable population of Division 2 console players moving to PC, but I'd say overall, Division 2 player is stronger on console. Micro transactions hurt every game, but they're revenue driven and ultimately has to exist if people want DLCs and new content in subscription or "server pop" decline. MMOs will always carry a similar format to entice people play with other people...but also the value in interaction and developing relationships...many turning into actual real-life relationships. It's a completely different experience than matchmaking with some random, one named "Orange_Peanut6969" in a battle royale and you never see the person in the game twice...It's just a different experience entirely.
I miss the days when the sole purpose of video games was for the players to have fun. Not spend money via microtransactions, not grind away like it's a full time job, just plain and simple fun.
ever heard of runescape its from 2000 and grindy af
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@@dylanlewis2766
Stuff can be grindy but rewarding.
New games are grindy with either no rewards/bad ones/limited or you have to buy loot boxes to get anywhere.
Ahhhh the golden age 🙏
@@dylanlewis2766 Sure, but that was a rarity at that time
@@bobshanery5152 Exactly
Not every game needs to be a live service. Players are going back to old behaviours of enjoying a game for a bit then moving onto the next one. I think if this continues, game quality may actually improve because devs can justify making a polished, self-contained experience.
exactly. why people think a game has to have 100,000+ addicted to it perpetually to be successful is beyond me.
You gotta smoke some strong shit if you think that this won't turn into less effort because they know people won't invest much time in a game.
@@BygoneT Not true, games are bad now because of the live services
Live services generate revenue for a longer time than one-time purchases. That's why most of the games will be, and aim to be, live services.
@@YourKingJDG Lmao you can't reduce the innumerable reasons for the changes in game design down to live service bad
I actually consider this is good to gamers. This phonemenon means the business of "Games as a service" has become less sustainable and profitable and it would force game developers to reconsider their strategy. More one-time purchase titles to come I hope.
Sounds great. Not sure I believe it though.
Too true I think the repetitive microtransaction,skin,lootbox whatever phase is almost over. CS:GO made skins awesome and resellable and then Fortnite made them a big draw and now its every single game that comes out to the point where skins and micros are not special anymore and lost the 'cool' factor. having some 1k skin in csgo meant others were like holy shit you have what?!? and now people dont even know the skin at all anymore cos we have 1000s for every game. Also when I was young we had BF MW BO and Halo and that was really the main 4, my school had at least 60% of the kids on halo 3 and then mw2 and bo1 and it made us friends to this day no matter how different we are and now its like these 8 kids play pubg, these 6 kids play warzone, these 50 play fortnite, a few play halo some are on cold war, a couple on csgo, sprinkle some on bf1 and few on bf4 maybe throw 7 kids on wow and a handful on overwatch, 4 on rts games and the rest split between destiny 1/2 and the rest split between all games old and new. I miss the only rivalry being PS v Xbox v PC and all three having large exclusive games. Xbox had CoD and Halo PC had all the BF CSGO and rpgs and PS had the jak and daxter and ratchet and clank and god of war etc. When you have everything you have nothing, when you have little you have more.
@@kfc2180 You forgot some of us remaining gta players 😢
If you are running an online game you have ongoing server costs. You can't cover that with a one-time purchase, or at least not for long. If the game can't pay for itself it will get switched off.
no it will mean more microtransactions to make up for loss
I remember getting bored of games back 2016-2017. Maybe it was because I was in college and getting older, idk - but I remember just feeling over-stimulated with the releases that year on. Way too much content that takes a while to learn, not having the storage space for everything, micro-transactions for skins and weird bundles that made no sense plastered everywhere, too much emphasis on immersion etc gave me burnout. I just liked being able to play mw2/fallout for hours and being able to turn my brain off.
On god. Since those games, nothing was the same
You would love interactive movies/games.
I mean anything you do for DECADES since you were a kid, and then wonder why you feel brunt out and "it doesn't have the same magic" is kinda insane..... like yeah of course, you are a grown ass adult. There are still great AAA and indie games out there, chained echos just came out this year made by one guy and is the best snes style JRPG I've ever played. Elden ring and Disco Elysium couldn't be more different game play wise. AAA publicly traded companies will always keep making games like this, but there are more good games out there than ever, it just won't be spoon fed to you by EA, Blizzard and Ubisoft
When a mediocre game like Elden Ring is praised as "awesome" and "amazing"... then you know gaming is dead. Also I've recently met people who either only play COD or Apex Legends.
These guys are only playing those games to be with their friends and they don't care about having a "game experience" with a story and sadly that seems to be the case more and more.
Nah I feel like 2007-2010 was peak game I feel like there was a point n I wanna say around when mine craft/skyrim/last of us came out... Every game from then on was open world or survival crafting n looting... Or if ur fps gamer straight up pay walls n unfair leveling where anyone with a job or life could not keep up.
This is good in so many ways. We don’t want grinding mechanisms in games, neither micro transactions. For last 2 years I have been only playing indie games, and I must say indie games are way more fun than unfinished, unpolished, and expensive AAA games.
The only game I want to grind on is RuneScape. The OG grinding game. Been grinding since age 10 and still don't have a 99 lmao
Don't forget there are still many great examples of AAA games that don't focus on those concepts. God of War, most 1st party Nintendo titles, from software games, these are the types of titles we need to support to show devs and publishers they can make money selling to us
Indie games also have micro transaction, but it less predatory than big title
Same! Recently I’ve been enjoying the likes of Celeste, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon and others. You can feel the care oozing out of every orifice of these indie games, and they’ve revitalized my love for the medium. I haven’t bought a AAA game since Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and that was the only one this year
@@Ruinred Agree. But they are rare. In fact, take a look at cyberpunk. It is from one of the beloved game publisher, CD Project Red. Still they messed up.
Let me rephrase my idea. Anything that is full price, like $70-$80 is going to be a garbage. (It doesn't include past releases) this rule is for new releases only.
As someone who has worked in the game industry for years, in my opinion, the issue is generally the same once the company gets big enough. Producers consistently need to have degrees in psychology and analytics is the only thing that the companies high ups will accept for reason to take ANY action of any kind. As a result of this, the producer is gonna spend all their time looking at the analytics and try to show why that should validate psychological abuse to the users in an attempt to convince them to either stay longer, buy more, etc.
This follows the analytics more than the devs who just want to make a fun product which also means it's a creative risk; So the quality game is replaced with a psychological analytic haze where every aspect of the game is reduced to a math problem of how do I convince the customer to do something they might not actually want.
ahh just like always ... big execs who have no fucking idea what they are doing ruining everything
Same is true for almost any other industry... That's capitalism for you..
@@Tallypt Corporatism
When the game plays the players, more than the players play the game.
@@lerchlambert Damn real shit tho
What really confuses me is when people call single player games "dead" after some time. Like it's a single player game. Not a live service.
I only want to play single player games
Had one friend talk trash about "Who plays half life 2 dude" well a lot of people finished it long ago so... yeah xD, many good games get this treatment, for no good reason most of the time.
@@StefKRah People think only the hype matters. That if the entire world isn't playing that one game that it is dead.
That's how my friend skipped Titanfall 2 for example.
I played Republic commanding 10 years later. People play games at their own pace and not the game of the moment.
We call those people "morons".
Those people are posers. They only play what they play because of the popularity or hype by whoever influencer they follow.
I think one of the biggest factors changing how we perceive games to be doing "well" or "dead" is that gaming is becoming less of a hobby of interacting with a medium (the game) and more about the social value (connection and experienced) derived from either the content or community.
Community is vital in games, however, I would disagree that the community aspect of games is getting stronger. Nowadays it's difficult to find games where all people are attentive engaged. Most people are in private chats or talking to people on Discord or other things. Back in the day games had more of a sense of community because everyone had to talk in the game channel. That's the only channel there was. Everyone HAD to be together...at least in the days of Xbox Live for the original Xbox. PC was probably still emulated console chatting of today.
T
Singleplayer games should never be called "dead games." a dead game is a game that cant provide you with the intended gameplay experience imo. meaning multiplayer games need a certain playerbase to sustain the intended player experience, if its pvp it needs to be able to match you with and against people of similar skill, if it can do this then it is not dead. it does not matter if theres 500000 servers full or if its just your 1 server, all that matters is if you get the experience you need.
a live service game could have its live service ended, meaning no more updates or patches, but that still leaves the game at where it was and if it has a playerbase needed to sustain the gameplay then its not dead.
vermintide 2 for example has a small but dedicated playerbase. its a 4 player coop game and you will find a 4 player lobby with no problems, so it is not dead, it will provide you the experience you paid for. it does not matter how many other people are playing in other servers, only your own matters.
As someone that is currently replaying a modded STALKER Clear Sky.
I agree that singleplayer games that don´t need a server can´t die.
The only thing that can kill such a game is a compatability problem with a new OS.
@@wesleygibson575 plus it’s always expected that player count is gonna go down on single player games exponentially eventually because people just play enough of it eventually to where they are satisfied and might not pick it back up again for awhile.
yes the experiace you "need" well said in ur comment
I prefer single player games and a physical copy of the game rather than digital downloads that can be taken away from me, even though I've paid for them.
Exactly I agree 100%
I’m turning 37 this year. My generation in this age group basically started the early gaming trend of NES, Super Nintendo, etc. Most throughout our life’s got married, had kids, probably joined the tech Industry for a career. My time and patients for newer games is so small. 90% of the time a game is unfinished or so buggy I can barely play it. Or some battle pass to purchase. 18 different special editions, to pick from. Just to name a few.
My time also to play is maybe a few hours on the weekend. I do have an older son and he’s more into mobile games or Snapchat. He has an Xbox he barely ever plays.
I feel this is maybe the same for others in my age group. The golden age for video games is far over and it’s just littered with greedy companies trying to increase next quarters profits.
I have the same issue. Im 35 and I can only play one hour per day max. There is a lot of multi-player online game that I had to drop because the grind is just too big. Even if I want to buy some micro transactions the way the games are made these days is to delay as much as possible anything you want to achieve or get. For exemple a game might have a tech tree or faction that locks you into a playstyle. If one night you just want to try something different you can't... you either have to drop a lot of money (without knowing if you'll like it) of massive amount of grind time that you don't have. In the end I feel the game becomes not enjoyable as it turns itself into an other chore on my day.
Yeah I’m 38 and grew u on the NES and sega genesis. I have an Xbox one that I barely play - it just never sucked me in as the games all are similar and I have much less time and drive to play. I remember the days when I could rent a sega genesis or NES game and spend half a day figuring it out and learning it. Those days are long gone and what’s worse is todays games are more complex and I just cannot spend hours learning the basics of a game .
I miss gaming as a youth!
pretty much this, micro transaction, incomplete games, game breaking bugs, early access etc, whales fuck y'all I'm out 💔
I'm 41 and I started playing video games on the Nes, Master System and Mega Drive era, I now have a PS5 and Xbox One, I rarely play on the Xbox, and the PS5 I just watch a lot of stuff on the console as I can't be bothered to play games now.
Yes are generation of gamers was the best.
@@KJames2345 old mfs
Honestly never understood why people care about player count with the exception being multiplayer games which I personally don't really play. People just need to play games they love and have fun playing. Take Elden Ring, I finished it and haven't played it for months but will come back to it to experience it again. Just play games you love, simple.
I agree with this whenever discussing what games we should play with my friends I have one friend always brings up top played games on steam blah blah blah it's like dude if we can find a game who gives a fuck but that's just all he is obsessed with metas and twitch numbers. Weird.
Because gaming is not longer about making a good game and having fun it’s about money. That’s why these Game companies, Content creators and influencers are constantly bringing up player count. The higher the player count the more people can make money off it and that’s why they worry when a certain game player count starts to drop. It’s sad what’s gaming has turn it.
@@RahemtheDream13 Very good point but I would say that there is still a large part of the industry where developers just want to make good games like Elden Ring, Stray, Fobia St Dinfna Hotel or The Quarry. But I understand that the biggest companies get the attention and make most of the money plus as you said influencers/content creators also push player counts which influence those that watch/listen to them. It does suck though, as you said, that the top of the industry has become what it is today.
Because Souls has always had a very active and thriving multiplayer scene with the coop and invasions. But Elden Ring fucked up those systems and pretty much buried a lot of them under the rug or straight up removed them, causing a lot of players to see them as JUST nice little single player adventures, when in reality a HUGE draw of Souls was always their unique multiplayer interations. Not with elden ring tho, so gg From, game is dying early this time around
@@HumzahHussain Yeah there are still companies and developers that care about making a good game like Elden Ring and indie games and I fully support them just feels like there out numbered by “live Service games” and “Battle pass games”. Just miss the early days of gaming where it was all about making the best game you can and not about player count and how to milk them.
As someone who grew up playing Playstation games and is now an adult Millennial, I can definitely say the one thing I'm really missing from games nowadays is the balance between depth and quality in both lore as well as gameplay mechanics to create a unique experience. Way too often now do I feel like I am making progress by learning and mastering the environment to my advantage until suddenly a roadblock occurs and the proverbial gacha/rng carrot is dangled in front of me, telling me that I can use money to progress or sacrifice the little free time I have to grinding a certain item or quest to proceed. It becomes incredibly frustrating when half the games I play now are just repeating one loop after another with no real incentive for strategizing different tactics or making the efforts rewarding in the long run. The lore on the surface just acts like a lure to draw a player in, but once you get to the meat of the game, it's just barebones or a convoluted mess meant to keep you guessing and wanting more for nothing.
I want the gameplay to be engaging to a point where it compliments the core experience, rather than just being an afterthought and companies going for psychological manipulation just to keep people engaged in their game. Shouldn't the game itself be engaging enough? Why must every popular game now have FOMO events slapped onto it as a bandaid. I think I'll just stick to my indie titles and keep my wallet firmly away from the hell that is in-game gambling from now on...
Also as an adult millennial you say too much like an epic monologue to get your point across. And it's always edited.
@@Gavin-Leo--uk I never heard of that being a millennial trait but ok.
@@Spats2Bats ... I have a generation X problem. It's called making stuff up on the fly to take the piss. And it's usually taken to seriously. Usually by millennials 🤣
@@Spats2Bats git gud
I think it has more to do with replay-ability of these titles. When a movie releases in cinemas you don't expect the opening weekend numbers to continue indefinitely. People have experienced it and have moved on. The same thing can be said for most players of these games. The content dries up and they leave. Nothing to be shocked about. If on the other hand the title is releasing consistent updates and content and still experiencing these declines, then that's an issue (for the developer...) And a lot of the these multiplayer games mentioned are OLD. Time to get some fresh blood into the system
Personally it doesn't matter. I'll get bored of any game eventually, no matter how much content the developers release. I'll probably come back to it after some years or months, and enjoy the content I missed that was added, but I'd return even if there was no new content. There being new content has little to zero impact on me going back to a title. No amount of content added to Path of Exile isn't going to make me play it when my hunger for ARPGs is satisfied already.
I mean everyone loved eldenring as well as ds1 and guess what both got dlc
@@zerkish9869 Same man, its like something seasonal.
Even with great replayability most people will leave the game after beating the game. Even for rogue-likes , most people will win 2-3 runs maybe and then leave.
If that were true, Elden Ring would still have a high player count. I stopped playing it not because of a lack of replayability but because I dumped 300 hours into it in a month and got burned out.
Gaming companies are listed on exchanges so they have to keep growing their value. That means that games are now designed to make loads of money as fast as possible and roadmaps/promises entirely depends on profits. That's the reason most games die...quality don't truly matter anymore just the cash shop. Look at games like Diablo Immortal...Even though Blizzard promised the game would be the best and most grandiose Diablo experience ever (it's definitely not), their only true goal was to generate LOTS of revenues FAST for their investors. If people like the game and it lives on, great, they'll keep adding stuff to buy in the cash shop! If it dies, well, who cares they made hundreds of millions with microtransactions over a couple of months, their 2022 numbers will be good and they'll find other ways to cash grabs their player base in 2023 and so on for future years.
Yep and the majority of gamer idiots eat it up so why change anything?
There's a subset of people who A) like a game B) think they know how to run a game and C) think the people currently running the game don't know how to run a game.
People like this like to point at player counts as proof that everyone should sign an online petition and boycott a game so they can scream for "change".
It's just an extension of tribalistic behaviors.
@@Josh-bb3xi yeah, ignoring that " tribalistic behavior" is EXACTLY why Blizzard went from absolute giant to being one of the many studios in the pockets of Microsft ( Blizzard has been purchased by Activision then Activision has been purchased by Microsoft). Genius move indeed. For Microsoft, ofc, not so much for Blizzard.
@@RejectedInch Good thing I'm not generalizing, then.
probably why web3 gaming looks so appealing to these gaming studios now, they would be able to rake in alot more cash, and promising play to earn for their customers
I also want to point out that people leaving a game doesn't always mean permanently. There are lots of games I will play for a while, take a break from, and then return to later. Everything needs a refresh time to remain fun, and that's normal and healthy.
Tf2 is the perfect exemple
Remember VTMB
@@Clonehelmethole not so much that game lol. TF2 is like 75% cheaters. No reason to ever go back
@@headphonesz6527 it’s a lot less worse now because the community stand strong
In wow's case there has been a consistent and dramatic decline since their height in wrath of the lich king. From that release on the trajectory has been downward. Wow once held the top stop and they boasted they had 12 million players. Id be surprised if they actually had a million, paying, customers as most these days use ingame gold to pay their subs. Wow is a disgusting game that abuses you, the player. And people are increasingly unwillign to spend time and pay for that. Myself included.
It's sad to see this happening for genuinely good games that got overhyped before launch and then didn't live up to the impossible standards people expected. One of my favorite games to be released in the last year was Back 4 Blood, which is a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, but was meant to take the game in a more roguelike / deck building setup where the game had a high difficulty and you could earn cards to gain new abilities like healing the whole team whenever you use a bandage, or increase your proficiency with certain things like melee attack speed or bullet penetration. The game had a full hate campaign ran against it on youtube because it wasn't a perfect copy of Left 4 Dead with minor improvements, but rather a new take on an old game's style. It became nearly impossible to find a team with matchmaking within 3 months. Thankfully, the devs were able to salvage it, and are soon to release their 3 major expansion with new maps, characters, cards, mechanics, etc. But there was a time where I was concerned that this game I fell in love with was going to be destroyed by pissy fans who wanted a product that they didn't get. I loved this game so much I uninstalled my free game pass version and bought the ultimate edition on steam for full price just to support it, only to have haters try to tear it down the following month. Sad thing is, is that this game is genuinely designed to be fun, and not to sell microtransactions because the devs have made a hard stance against microtransactions and refuse to add them to the game. There are no MTX in this game, you get access to the DLC content if just one person in your group has it, and the game is released free on game pass, yet people still complain about the standard price tag on the game. The problem is largely with the players, not the companies, because they sabotage great games and spend countless money on MTX.
(1/2) Yeah! I agree with you
(2/2) I'm mourned about both you and that game. Shame that modern gamers ruining most latest great games.
The way you described the decline in Elden Ring was what happened in my case. After 3 characters and roughly 300hrs I needed a break. I got all the achievements and after about 50 to 100hrs of pvp I was ready to put it down for a while. I'll go back to playing it probably in similar fashion to how I approach Skyrim. Months from now I'll get an itch and play somewhere in the ballpark of another 50 to 100hrs. Rinse and repeat.
it's a single player game, it's not designed for people to put in more than a couple hundred hours. I put in a bit less than 300 over 2 playthroughs and had enough for a while. I'll definitely do at least 1 more later but for now I'm good
Have you tried the expanded Free Trial of the critically acclaimed MMORPG FFXIV? You can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for FREE with no restrictions on playtime
And its also been growing for 9 years
ER DLC is coming hopefully November or December. Find out at the Tokyo Games hopefully.
I am on my fifth character. I have done every build pretty much running a strenght build now. I enjoy the PvE a lot though. I like to literally play for a while with most weapon types.
To me a big problem (only for multiplayer games as singleplayers can't die imo) is that games seem to never have anything to work towards. Your reward for playing the game is getting to play the game more, every skin, cosmetic etc are always behind pay walls so once you've had your fun with the game there no reason to boot it up again.
you just described OW2/OW1.5 which locked any progression behid a huge paywall or deleted it. I like the gameplay but there is zero progression and that for me was half of the fun getting the nice skin i wanted by just playing, even leveling was delted etc.
That's just my opinion but the fact that you use the word "Work" reveal one of the problems in the industry nowadays. It isn't only pay-wall but simply walls, the only reward you should want from playing a game is having fun, not keep playing to collect virtual items and feel like you are working for it. The fun is a good reason enough to boot it up again. What the point of collecting items if you don't have fun playing the game ? That's an addiction problem.
@@ksemi The word 'work' doesn't mean anything here. Alex meant 'progress'. And that is a wonderful feeling, especially in an online game, where there are things to accomplish together. That can be truly fun. And collecting things surely is one of those internal button pushers for the brain sure, it's part of the fun and addiction, but that's the same as getting a headshot or driving a fast car in a game, it's all part of setting off a 'ding' in the brain and getting the reward/rush. Some people don't have the intelligence, patience, diligence, or imagination for collections and progress. They see button smash, they want button smash, they think button smash is fun. And it is. It's all fun. And it's all addiction. And it's all 'work'. You work hard to satisfy your 'fun'. Just like Alex, just like everyone else. Don't twist people's words if you don't want someone to come along and do the same to you.
@@nothingtoseehear5012 Well, again, that's just my opinion and I'm not against progression nor cosmetics collection at all. I used to play some MMORPG, Competitives FPS and CCG online. Progressing and collecting items is a nice addition only as long as you enjoy the core gameplay of the game.
I was mostly reacting to the sentence "Once you've had your fun with the game there's no reason to boot it up again" and said that it won't matter then if the content is locked behind a pay-wall, a grind-wall or even free, if you don't have fun anymore then collecting "skins and cosmetics" won't change that.
I'm still playing CS from time to time since 1.6 and I never bought a skin, simply because I enjoy the gameplay and if someday I stop having fun then it won't matter if they give me all the skins for free. It would just have been a plus to have them from the start.
There's actually a difference between a hobby and an addiction Just like poker, there are players who enjoy a game with friends for free and others who do it for the gambling, expecting a reward and only have pleasure when they have it. In both cases the brain releases dopamine but the mechanisms behind are different. You can enjoy both the process and the reward but when you start making efforts without pleasure for it then it's what I call working and crossing the border of the addiction. I like to believe that the jouney is more important than the destination.
Addiction is a complexe subject and just like marketing and advertisement, the video-game industry has mastered it and is exploiting all the hooking/gotcha mechanisms such as built-in reward and compulsive loop, mostly in online and Mobile gaming but some people don't have the intelligence, the honesty or the courage to recognize it, they just want their reward.
Single player games can die from things like licences expiring, Driver San Francisco for example - can't even buy that game anymore except from second hand sellers
I feel like content creators with their sponsorships from developers (especially on twitch) have a big influence on why games get a large surge of players and when their sponsored stream deal ends, the streamer moves on and so do their viewers. Gaming feels more trend oriented than ever before.
I feel like it’s also because the most popular games now are multiplayer games, and every company has joined in. In the past it was just a handful of solid multiplayer games (CoD, Minecraft, WoW, etc). But now every company has a BR, shooter, mmo, etc etc.
But you are completely correct. Everyone follows the top streamers. Some people I know won’t even try a game unless they watch someone play it first.
I was going to type the exact thing.
I needed to see this video. Lots of good points, and as an older millennial who also remembers the Blockbuster days of just getting something and having fun for the sake of it, I enjoy the reminder of what this video brings - just have fun, stop looking at the numbers, and it is okay to move from one game to the next - be the player, not the played.
Are you talking about the days of renting games from blockbuster and forgetting to return them for weeks?
Mentioning a single player RPG with an added multiplayer like Eldenring with a whole roster of games that are purely multiplayer is a weird comparison to make. Elden Ring player base is designed to drop off. People have mostly completed the game. The multiplayer aspect has never been that large. Its done pretty good in longevity but the decrease is quite expected and within the norm.
I get the article is for player decline. but the selling point of Eldenring wasnt its community.
You are wrong
Very wrong
No he is right. Elden Ring isnt a live service like the other games. In its core design its meant to be played for a limited amount of time (sooner or later you played all weapons, spells, incantations and you explored the entire map many times over). Until a content DLC gets released the player count by design will drop to less then 1% of its peak or even average playerbase.
@@xeibei4804 thanks for explaining why he’s wrong lol
@@Y0G0FU Yupp. Can be seen with the Dark souls games aswell. The witcher 3. Batman games. Assassin's creed franchise. Breath of the wild.
i saw firefall gameplay and started crying . it was one of my favourite mmo off all time , and even if im guilty of not having played enough , i still god damn wished the devs would have given us a repository of all the updates of the game with the server files and be like "the game is not profitable for us to develop and maintain anymore , go my flocks , have your own servers of your own will and have fun with what we created . be free to tweak it how you want . your time is nigh , have at it" but alas it was not the case , and yes as im writing this , i still have tears running down my eyes cuz even to this day , im mourning this game . over and out .
I feel you, friend. I was very upset when it was suddenly gone and it still makes me sad to think about. I feel like lack of marketing due to the company being small and throwing most of its resources at development might have had something to do with its demise as well as possibly it being considered in beta for longer than it needed to be as I hardly ever noticed anything broken or unfinished about it. Moreover I would think the fact that honestly... pretty objectively... it tried to do a lot of things which other games already had but tried to smush them together as a sort of 'best of all worlds' thing didn't necessarily make it feel like a copycat of other games but it probably gave enough people the "been there, done that" vibe that its 'hook' being that it Was a hybrid of the best of a lot of great concepts might have been what prevented it from enchanting more people. Other more popular games due to the companies who owned them being rich just hip-bumped them out as competition.
It had a premise a bit like Subnautica meets Half-Life, gameplay similar to Destiny 2 and Overwatch which in turn just expanded on 1999's Team Fortress Classic which I played extensively and its less loyal sequel, TF2, and put it all in an open world RPG setting which was extremely reminiscent of Guild Wars 2 mechanically and the super fun motorcycle actually reminds me a lot of GW2's Roller Beetle mount which Firefall did first. I think various vehicles, had the game lived, would have resembled some of GW2's just by accident.
What's to miss about it is definitely how fun all of those elements coming together actually was and the atmosphere in general. To me at least there was inexplicably a sense of... hang-outtie-ness (yeah, I'm very articulate) where I could just sit on the shore for a few hours and be fine. And the weather effects were quite memorable too, particularly when the big anomaly events popped up. City of Heroes didn't allow the selling of its IP despite the unprecedented enormous amount of money offered for it at sunset and the world famous author Mercedes Lackey leading the charge but eventually it got rescued and revived again somehow, thank goodness. I had no hope for it but I was proven wrong. Perhaps one day a miracle will save Firefall.
PS: I don't know if the RPG aspects within Firefall appealed to you as much or more than the fact it was a shooter but as far as open-world events, world bosses, a sense of character immersion and the most customizable and entertaining mount/transportation system any MMO might ever have goes, Guild Wars 2 might give you a sense of nostalgia. I of course dunno if you've ever played it but in case not: imo it's very reminiscent of Firefall without the first person shooter aspect and no jump packs making you an airborne pinball in combat. Still, it can be satisfying in how it is similar and though expansions cost a bit the whole base game is free to try with only a few restrictions like chat channels and trading to prevent bots. Happy to talk more about it or help you out if you decide to play if you'll let me know.
In any case, I do hope you're playing games lately that still make you happy! :} Be well!
It's cheaper to develop a game that will only run on servers the developer controls. Netcode robust enough to run on arbitrary servers, and especially the part of letting clients find these arbitrary servers, takes quite a few more man-hours than baking the IPs of official servers into game data and pushing updates to change that data of necessary. And the other part is efficient use of bandwidth: a game isn't going to have many successful community servers if getting below 100ms ping requires the server having an enterprise grade connection. The reality is, they don't want the users to realise and publish the fact that they've put all their dev time into gimmicks, pretty graphics and microtransactions while the server-side stuff is a barely-functional mess worse than ancient games like TF2 or Wolf:ET, which were made in an era where developers had no choice but to be intelligent about what is and isn't necessary to send back and forth between client and server.
Firefall is such a good game killed by Mark Kern's mismanagement and nothing else. It's all Mark Kern.
I would struggle to think of an MMO to compare to the case of Firefall. The name itself is ironic, and it burned hot, grew fast and fell just as quickly. I would say it is a perfect example of a game that was released too soon. Given another dedicated 8 months of polish and more end game content it would have been a long term success. A LOT of the decline was due to bad reviews and experience due to bugs, glitches and exploits. Much of this could have been mitigated with polish and thus would have MAINTAINED a generous portion of the players who tried the game. Due to the bugs, glitches and exploits, many left the game early and others never gave the game a chance due to bad feedback. That has a compounding impact on long term success and viability. There is also the ridiculous amount of money they spent on random dumb stuff for the sake of advertising or because someone had a random idea. Personally I miss my jet packing, rocket launching, jumping, flak blasting, gliding, bike riding, justice seeking soldier wearing his samurai outfit. Shoutout to Pimpnizzle at the time.
Awesome game....the Chinese company drove it into the ground. They took a great game and destroyed it. It was so awesome in beta.
The distance it takes for a game being fun and for it to become boring is shorter these days. The avarage age of the player base used to be 26-30 years old, that has increased as well. We're growing older and the young ones are stuck with fortnite, Roblox, minecraft, cod and Fifa games. The rest are casuals drifting from one game to another.
I believe that the majority of the gamers which are adults get's bored of a game quite fast. The reason for this IMO, and from my own experience, is because the games being made is the same games you played yesterday, or last year. Todays new games are reskins and are pretty much identical to other games. Todays games are boring, yesterdays games are also boring.
100% I agree i jump from game to game I work all week and I have to have family time on the weekens I barely get to play any games 🎮 so I try to play most of them then come back to the same game and all lost what was I doing again 😁
Playing Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana reminded me how great video games can still be.
The niche, indie and AA scene is a gold mine of unforgettable titles.
If you are on console then yes but if it also exist on PC it's much harder not to find something new there, there are tons and tons of indies mixing genre and taking risks now, we are very far from far cry, assassins creed and need for speed mentality on pc. Just look at city builders or even card battlers there are tons but so much that uou can easily find something great for you. That said as long as I have my staple food aka CSGO im fine. I bought a steamdeck recently and there are just too many indie games I want to play now. Too luch games to fix on one. Even if we see the next equivalent of warcraft 3 or Wow i'll never be playing only that because i would not want to miss out on indies. And consoles companies are waking up they are preparing great groundshaking titles im pretty sure because of next gen and they have to show up against the indies dominance over the market now. Years ago i would play RTS and FPS but now I can touch a little bit everything I think there's no shame in testing games trying to get a feel for it and move on if it is not keeping me. Video games are a little bit like poetry sometimes, look at simplistic genre like the SHMUPS it's an exercise of style and small difference can have big impact it's like how to find a univers on a grain and sand.
Disagree, Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak is a lot of fun, and Monster Hunter World Iceborne is still a wonderful game.
@@gojigiante You're not really disagreeing with anything here, you just happen to have found a game you enjoy. It will get boring btw.
Good games don't just die. They will always be remembered
Something I noticed particularly on Steam. If you look at a games achievements a lot of the most basic achievements on a game are often not completed by the majority of people. As though they bought it and either never played it or played 20mins and put it down. This seems often the case even for games that have been out for years. Could this be contributing? Possibly imo
like certain achievements being "Start a new game" and then only like 49% of players having it, like what?
I own 4000 games.
I play about 100 so far
Your mom's finally here!! I'll send her home in the morning.
@@wolfattackz187 they get it on humble bundle or through a gift and they just never get around to playing it
@@wolfetteplays8894 yeah, I have games I haven't played yet but they are usually free ones
Easy answer, the greatest gamer generation is getting older.
It's not that simple it's more the fatigue side as every kind of game has been played before and there aren't many games that feel satisfying anymore as every type of game is becoming repetitive
We're also coming out of a few years of COVID seclusion. The USA has been posting big job growth. People are putting down their games and getting back to their normal lives out in the world.
@@K40005 Look for indie games. Playing one right now that i have loved since 2020, a dinosaur survival game
So you are in your 50s?
"WE WUZ DA GRAYTIST JENURASHUN,,,,,," No. It's because games are BORING.
I think a large part in longevity of a title is that gameplay is very shallow these days. It doesn't take long to experience most loops in a game. Even developers that release content rarely introduce new game loops. Just a reskinned version of the same old thing.
This. Content is hundreds of hours supposedly but I'm doing the same few decisions over and over and over to maximize efficiency.
exactly- plus, something to "earn"... ie: Fortnite arena points (status) / Valorant competitive rank; WoW items / REAL WORLD economy
"games are Shallow" 100%, sir. And uninteresting too. Companies don't to take any Risks or implement improved aspects from other games.
My old gamer friends and I pretty much quit gaming already. Until something interesting appears. But seems unlikely.
@@joshanonline We need indie dev risks with triple A budgets but that won't happen.
@@joshanonline I am noticing more and more that 95% of the games that I play are indy games. They are the ones who put REAL effort into their games. Or it's remasters of really old games, too. Or just straight up old games.
"Big" games are indeed shallow and are all the same thing. All MMOs I've seen are reskinned WoW, basically, and a copy of each other. Also, the ROI on them is now abysmal. It was a new genre and people poured in thousands of hours, because it was a one of a kind IP, based on an existing universe that was with us for a decade before that. I remember being in hospital as a small kid, and dad tried to cheer me up by explaining Warcraft II and then we played it together. OF COURSE WoW was special at the moment, but now...? A game that requires me to be online almost 24/7 can just bite it. There's too much nice games with interesting mechanics or incredible, edgy/serious/brilliant stories from indy devs that will give me more in ten hours than your reskin of WoW will give me in 500.
I really miss the time when a game was released, you got the entire game, and it worked as intended the second you bought it. No day 1 patch, no game breaking glitches, no microtransactions, you got what the developers said was going to be in the game and more, what was showcased in a preview was guaranteed to be in the game, and most of all we just played for fun. We didn't care how good or bad we were, you just played because you enjoyed it. Now that I do TH-cam, it's great looking back and seeing how much fun I was having.
Thank you for the video. You sir have earned another subscriber. Keep up the great work!
True. Since games went online everything went to shit. Really miss when you bought it and enjoyed it as it is, no online BS and constant changes, just a fun and worthwhile finished product.
They did this back then too, minus the microtransactions cause they hadn't figured that out yet. Spore was the No Man's Sky of it's time, with a literal smoking gun in it's Collector's edition booklet showing they dropped a whole bunch of content like Aquatic mode, several creature creation features, and being able to beam down on a planet to do more than just look at the randomly generated fauna. They added some of it back but only if you bought their expansion packs for like $20 a pop. There was also the creative black hole that was the movie tie-in/licensed game, which had worse workplace conditions than EA and produced games more bug ridden and half-heartedly cobbled together than anything see previous has made. They pretty much just preyed on children and brand recognition, not too different from how TH-cam Kids operates now.
In the Arcade and DVD days it was actually easier to re-release games to sweep suspicions of a broken/buggy game under the rug through revisions. If you released a shit game, it took months before word of mouth had millions of people's eyes on it since the internet wasn't as popular back then, so you could revise the game and release a 'Greatest Hits' version or just put the new game in the same disk boxes before the bad version ruined your reputation and you were in the clear. They also had some shit monetization practices too: SF2 popularized the revision formula that plagued Fighting games for two decades and are only just now breaking out of that garbage practice. Don't forget expansion packs, which could also be exploited to release a shit game and then require a $40 disk patch to make your game actually playable or give it worthwhile content.
Only differences are 1) We grew up and became wiser cause of the shit practices we already went through 2) Better Internet means shit on release games get found out within hours rather than months 3) Games are a huge industry, so there are more people looking to get in for profit rather than passion. Nothing changed about the games industry, just that we became more aware of predatory practices while the games industry continued to use its very exploitable monetization schemes, now with better user monitoring technology and more than competent marketing teams to bend their users over backwards.
Nah. Alot of shit games back in the days too
Those games still exist! They're just very few developers that do that anymore... Eidos Montreal, ID Software, Quantic Dream, Nintendo, Crystal Dynamics, and Remedy Entertainment, are all companies that have a track record of doing that. They release a games exactly as advertised. Devolver Digital is one of my favorite publishers because they push all these super interesting and weird indie games to the market that come exactly as advertised. They're just great.
Rose tinted glasses I think. A lot of older games were bugged to hell, with tons of glitches. They often got re-released later down the line to patch bugs and exploits, and often added more content in the form of secret dungeons, secret bosses, super bosses, new areas, characters, dialogue, new weapons and armors, enemies, items, or such things like that for their respective genres. And people have always cared if they were good, that's just human nature. Competitive by default. The scene was small but tournaments did exist and people strived to play at the top, even way back in the day during the first generation of consoles and the arcade era.
I can agree on the microtransactions part though.
Due to the nature of Elden ring I think it’s likely that people play the game once for the experience and if they like it they may play it up to like 3 times more for a different build for example and then leave, the amount of time it takes to do that many playthroughs is roughly a few months for the average person I’d guess so the fall off is just people being finished with it and may return at some point for something like DLC
Exactly, same reason I haven’t played for a while, the first time exploration was amazing, i’ll never forget the feeling stumbling onto all the locations in the Lands Between but after that it loses its element of exploration
Agreed. Sure, Elden Ring is "always on", but it's still, for the most part, a single-player experience. When I finished the game, as many do, we get the option of a new game+. I know some people love to replay an experience like Elden Ring again, but me? Nope. I never bought into the new game+ experience for any game. I don't gain any value out of playing the same thing again and any differences that may be present isn't worth the time for me, especially with all these competing games vying for my attention.
@@XBluDiamondX what games do u play then
Exactly.
Done all that and don't want to risk some kind of Elden Ring fatigue before the DLC drops.
The fact it blows the guys mind that games such as for honor and new world that didn't deliver on their promises are dropping in player count is really funny. He literally named Realm Royale too as if anyone actually ever played it. This is what's called begging the question and it's a master manipulation tactic by clickbaiters on TH-cam
I avoid always-online/live-service games like the plague nowadays, that essentially excludes 90% of all AAA titles in these times.
Besides the issues you mentioned with stuff getting shut down down the line, most games no longer value a players time. Like, it's nice that you as a company want to keep me playing for as long as possible with all these things to do and systems, but I have a limited time to play and when the developers have essentially a to do list of dailies for me to grind out before I can start having fun with the game they clearly do not value my time.
I remember for a time we had limited internet due to location. We had only so much usage so the only game that was playable without using all the internet was WoW and I am sure there were others. I remember playing a few online always games and suddenly we had huge service charges within a week of the new month. It was crazy! Now, we do not have to worry about this because time has moved on (this was 10-years ago), and we moved to a more connected area with unlimited internet, 10x the speed, and half the cost. Makes a huge difference to not care or have to worry about internet usage.
Ok
I think it has a lot to do with the way our brains are wired and programmed now. We are brainwashed into consume, buy ,waste repeat . Our attention spans and emotions are completely different . We want to blame it on game quality and all that which may add but it's us . Take halo 2 when that game dropped I remember feeling happy I actually got joy and had fun playing by myself or with friends. I was able to play off and on 2 years or more etc without getting bored. Same with black ops 1.
I haven't felt the same about in so long I can't remember the last time. Even if they dropped games like our old favorites ( but enhanced for our current technologies ) I truly believe we would hate on them and think they are garbage barely play them. It's us we gotta stop having impossible expectations learn to be happy and appreciate the small things in life again .
this is a great point, our expectations have exponentially increased.
I think having private servers and old school server browsers extends the life of games extensively. Match making is a good feature but can only work well if there are enough players. If an oldschool game had a server for a particular map, game mode or custom game/mod a person could join an empty server. They showed interest in playing that map/node and that could lead to a domino effect of players trickling in. Also the ability to play 1v1 or any uneven number could lead to more players jumping in. I think a great feature in a queue based system would be free for all waiting room map to kill time while you wait. There are examples of similar things existing but I think every game with a queue system should have something like that. Waiting for an hour in WOW for an LFR raid where the tanks and healers can rage quit after 1 failed pull is dogshit.
pretty much pavlov
Similar frustrations with destiny raids, where not only did the game force me to friend strangers with _my personal psn account_ instead of just an in game friendship, but also you would get into a raid, get part way through then have someone bail with no options for the team. It was structured to be nearly/practically impossible without enough players, so losing 1 with a team that isn't top tier would always end in frustrated attempts until enough people gave up that we ended.
Over an hour of frustration is not a good way to end a gaming session, so it soured me on their endgame content.
The irony is they have the very fun recipe of strike missions, which their raids take nearly every aspect and flip to the opposite.
Those are always the best experiences, cause most devs these days are making games for longevity. Once they release a game it gets a skeleton crew to not fix it or make it better but barely keep it running til the next game comes out.
@@codranine6054 yeah an end of life plan for every game should be private servers and whatever modders need from the devs to keep the game running.
tf2 was a good example of this. too bad the bots ruined it
For me, I got into a relationship, my friends got into relationships, and then it all went down hill from there. Kids, promotions at work, parties, meetings, a dog(s). I play single player games now (when I can), and they are usually chill games. Online multiplayer games are filled with transactions and rude people; financial anxiety and cussing are not relaxing haha. I need a game that I can drop at a moment's notice when I need to attend to the people and events in my life.
Edit: I should add, yes, maybe people around the 30-something age group aren't the target anymore. Younger people are supposed to fill the void we leave behind. But that's hard to do when games become cost-prohibitive even AFTER purchase. It's not easy to ask your parents or guardian for money when they're struggling with inflation and rent. Also, if your parents are anything like millennial gamers, they will scoff at the quality of games being put out today.
THIS. I collect PC Engine shmups primarily now. Pick up and play. Who has time for the other stuff. I'm a full time partner at a national law firm. With kids and a wife and life goals. These "life replacement" games with achievements and endless grind content...aren't really games.
They not talking about old uncles.
Morrowind, Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Fable, Age of Empires, basically any old game 👍
@@ramiradams3653 lol this. OP You aren't the main target here.
@@ramiradams3653 they “aren’t”. Ramir, you didn’t learn to speak English that way, don’t pretend to speak in Ebonics on the internet.
You failed to mention the most important point:
Developers now rely on hype-marketing to rake in the profits from sales. They know it is no longer smart to invest in new/unique gameplay that will sustain a community. This is why most of the industry is about rapid growth and quick burnout , leading to "DED" games (when they realized the game is basically shallow and has solid endgame)
I also wanted to add as someone who only got into gaming very recently : gaming isn't dying. However, if you joined gaming like 15 years ago, you probably joined it for an experience that is wildly different from what's available today, which is pretty normal !
Yes. Gaming is a really broad term and doesn't really do much to distinguish the various subtypes within it. In the 90s and early 00s, games were as much of a commitment as renting a movie from blockbuster. They aren't really designed like this anymore by large publishers
@@DeusPsycho Staying at my Grandma's for the weekend and renting a video game to play together! Man did she have mixed emotions when I picked South Park rally! Good Times!
I'm apart of that 90% - main reason being I'm trying to catch up on older games slowly. RDR2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Sekiro, Deliver us the Moon, and occasionally play CoD. Could be the case for many others too, just branching out and enjoying a lot of single player games
Exactly. I used to play lots of CoD and R6, but I've mostly just been mucking around with mates in open world games like RDO and I have been playing things like ghost of tsuhsima, RDR2, God of war, uncharted, last of us stuff like that
RDR2 is a single player masterpiece...they abandoned multi-player for GTA.
Same here too
Guardians of the Galaxy is absolutely solid and highly recommend playing it anytime you can get a chance. It's like playing a comic book, with a rich story and the writing for the characters is great.
same 👍👍
Whether or not player numbers in a game is important or not, is entirely up to what type of game it is. For Singleplayer games it doesn't really matter. Most of them are just "buy once, play through and put down". But for live service games and MMO's, there NEEDS to be a healthy playerbase.
That, and the publishers being all too eager to axe MMOs that fail expectations.
They probably think they're threatening the playerbase by sending an implied message like 'play and spend on this game or we kill it' - scaring players into paying when actually, players wised up and started looking for the axe itself before touching the game.
It's also a way of sticking it to the man, when sometimes publishers make almost deliberately bad games that the community ignores so it gets sent to the shadow realm within the same year.
So yeah, watch reviews, check the player count, watch dev streams (another source of insight into their commitment), roadmaps, and steer clear of anything that can't pull it's weight.
That this factor got completely ignored in this video is totally baffling to me. Using a metric for multiplayer games to judge single player games is just weird.
@@Ungeboren1988 I am baffled why didnt he put MULTIPLAYER GAMES in the title because he clearly acknowledged the difference between the two in the video and talked about multiplayer videogame exclusively.
@@outlander234 Ah yes Metal Gear Solid the multiplayer Game.
@@Ungeboren1988 He mentioned it briefly and the rest of the time he talked just about multiplayer games and yes Elden Ring but thats technically a singleplayer game... So his title is just pure clickbait.
To me this is what made games like the single player Balders Gate games so good.
It made no difference how many others were playing and by playing different characters and parties the game was very replay able and offered a completely different experiences and outcomes to the player.
The original Balders gate PC game is almost 25 years old and you still have people talking about it and playing it today.
This is what makes for a great game and gaming experience.
I miss good multiplayer games, quake champions isn't even good
It's "Baldur's Gate", but yes, people are still playing it. I'd be playing it right now if I could be bothered to recover my savegames from my last harddisk upgrade (Steam version doesn't have cloud save, as I found out after the upgrade).
I think we owe Valve (and to some degree Gog) a great deal of gratitude for making it possible for us to still be able to buy these games and play them on modern systems. Back when games came on physical media, once sales dropped below a certain amount, it was no longer financially sound to keep pressing more discs. It was no longer financially sane for shops to keep them on their limited shelf space either, since that space would be better used for the newer games that were still in their peek-sales stage. So games were only available for a relatively brief period until the remaining copies ended up in the bargain bin. This meant no more sales, and therefore, no more updates to keep it compatible with newer operating systems either. But with digital distribution, there's no great cost associated with selling more copies. Which has led to games remaining on the platform, and receiving occasional bugfix/compatibility updates, since they still sold enough to make that small investment of developer time worth it.
Unrealistic expectations. Single player games will last a short time but be fun. Multiplayer games usually die a few weeks after launch as they are boring.
Some of the best and most addicting games I've played recently have been single player Indie games. Valheim, Dyson Sphere Program, Dawn of Man, Kingdoms Reborn, etc. Valheim is an example of a game that peaked huge and dropped off, but that doesn't mean the game is still great. There's literally 1000s of mods for the game and they're being pumped out every week.
What keeps me from playing games for extended periods of time has to do more with the social aspect of things.
For me it's Project Zomboid with mods I really like it until I felt bored again cause I have no friends to play with. Which is sucks
Totally and they are solid into web3 gaming, just look at defimons who is almost ready... owning our assets and the community controlling the game economy is the future
I believe gamers in general are feeling a form of fatigue and are spiritually hungry for something more fulfilling. This is why I feel that gamers(myself included) find themselves going from game to game, searching for something that can hold our interest and attention. I have stage 3 cancer and I've found myself reflecting more on how I spend my time. I've made a conscious decision to step away from playing as many game and spend time with my family, my dogs and being engaged with the world as much as possible. If you find yourself constantly searching for the next game, not really finding anything to hold your interest, or just searching for that feeling you used to get while immersed in a game. Try going for a walk, take your dog if you have one. If you have family around you ask them to go with you or watch a movie together. Find some time to engage with them and connect. Life is fleeting, as much as I love gaming it's not what we should focus our time on. Then, when you have that time. Gaming will be that much more enjoyable again. Good luck to those on the search, and God bless.
God bless my dude, good luck with everything
Bless u ❤️🙏 Ur gonna win that cancer Ur strong !!!much love to u and Ur family ❤️🙏
Yes stop gaming. Spend time with family. You don't want regret for you or them
This makes "go outside and touch some grass" not just a meme insult. I wish you the best on your health dude. It doesn't take cancer for gamers to feel this way. You can see the restlessness and dissatisfaction in the numbers.
we gamers chase the dragon and don't even realize it.
I think there's a lot of subjectivity when it comes to the world of gaming and what is truly constituted as "dead." In the world of a live-service driven ecosystem I can certainly see the sentiment of a dead game being more applicable, since if that game truly does lose player count then that company will likely see lower sales due to no one purchasing their in-game merch. On the other hand, we're now seeing a resurgence of retro games and being an 80s baby, growing up around rental shops like Blockbuster, Roger's Video, Microplay, etc, these once "dead" titles are being revived in a lot of ways due to many people wanting to relive those moments.
I agree that once you've completed a game, unless there's some massive replay value in it, you're likely going to put it down and move on. Does that equate to a dead game? Absolutely not, since you've pretty much invested all that you could and received your money's worth.
I stand in solidarity with blockbuster video
It’s like the whole entertainment era, before this woke GenZ’s takeover, was the GOAT.
I feel like most games have turned into jobs. You put so much time into a game and its like wow. I want something with a good story that has me coming back. Just me though.
As someone that have been playing gachas for long, I can say that I treat then as a routine.
Or I do play it everyday on point or I don't play it.
I do have a Wii and I used to play it a lot and I still know what fun used to be, and the games I played didn't forced me to get into a routine or do a event daily without missing. Pure fun, I can say.
Games lost the "Fun" factor...
I'm still sticking up for the gaming industry, even that I'm getting older, because I'm a hopeful type person, and I never make predictions of the mystery that is the world we live in.
play hades
trust me thats a lot of fun
Concurrent player counts matter in multiplayer games, especially those that require a minimum amount of players to start a game, as this drastically increases lobby wait times. This becomes even more important when you're playing a multiplayer game with an elo or ranking system that needs to match players of similar skill level in the same lobby, such as RTS.
Player count really matters in multiplayer. If I q up for a match and have to wait 15 minutes to find an opponent, I'll play 1 match instead of 3, then move on to a game where it doesn't take as long. Also, it feels bad to hear that the promises the devs made get pulled. In singleplayer I really couldn't care less, but I do have concerns my favourite online game could be getting shut down in a few years, and that bothers me.
Also with lower player count the lobbies get very painful because is either a sweat fest or a noob stomp because the algorithm doesn’t have enough to pool from. This makes the gameplay worst lowering the player count and making the problem even worst.
queue not q lol
The effect is exponential
@@adultdeleted laugh out loud not lol. ;)
@@agnidas5816 winking not ;)
😛
Player counts should only really matter for online multiplayer games. As someone in Australia multiplayer games can quickly die off. I cant play DUOs in Apex for example because there are not enough people playing that mode.
One of the reasons I mainly stick to Co-op PVE games or Singe player.
Yep, love living in Australia but this is one downside. Hear people saying older multiplayer games are active but when I check they're dead and takes forever to find a match. Thing is i wouldn't mind high ping but multiplayer games try very not to pair people with high ping so being in Australia means finding no matches.
I quit Apex. Played it since day 1, it was always the same repetitive content over and over with 1 or 2 big changes and then the gun meta being changed. Boring, repetitive and not really a challenge. Oh God and the bugs... Same old bugs every season taking weeks, months, if not years to fix. That's also why I think games have taken a huge hit.
@@MoNosEmpire Yeah that is fair. Most multiplayer games are like this tho unless it is an MMO.
@@Teraplexor1 After watching Australia for the last two years, it has a few more downsides than one.
@@Timithos eh not really, only downside is price of living going up. Wouldn't trade living here for anywhere else.
Losing a player base is a sign of something... Whether it be that the company fucked up in the extreme, another game came out, a global pandemic, etc, you can't judge the QUALITY of that game for you personally on it, you can't with any game, or anything at all for that matter... It DOES NOT however correlate that gaming is dying BECAUSE OF that reason... Gaming IS dying... Gaming USED to be profitable because it was GOOD, now 'micro' transactions exist, loot boxes, etc, THOSE have RUINED gaming... So YES, gaming IS dying, but not because their playerbase LEFT, because the playerbase will continue to NOT COME BACK due to bullshit the companies are doing to nickel and dime a PLAYER... We're customers now, not players, not gamers, not fans, just however much money we can drop is what they're aiming for...
I really loved this video because it takes the time to acknowledge both why we SHOULD and SHOULD NOT focus on player counts. They do paint a picture of what a game is doing, but in a lot of cases, it doesn't paint the ENTIRE picture. Elden Ring being a perfect example, like you said. One of the best games of the year, an easy classic for years to come...but it's also crushingly difficult, and I don't blame a single person, especially those who LOVED it, to get to the end and go, "PHEW, done with this now, can't wait to put this down and play something EASY for a change." Great game, but player counts dropping should be EXPECTED! Putting it down when a person gets to the end doesn't mean it was bad.
Even in live service games and MMOs, especially ones that are free to play, peak player counts will ALWAYS be high, as truckloads of people will install, jump in, try it out, and a ton of folks will say "eh, this isn't for me, gonna play something else." We only have so much money to spend on games, as well as time to play the ones we enjoy.
But, that said...if a live game has a sizable budget, both for development AND maintenance, and only has 5-10 players logging in every day...the game ends up being not profitable enough to keep alive, and may get shut down.
Player counts do matter, but ebbs and flows occur.
To the contrary, I think this video suggests why we ought not to focus on player counts. But rather consider them carefully after we've spent some time to consider what the player counts might actually mean, instead of what we think they might mean.
I agree it's very confusing to me why I see some people making a big deal of Elden Ring's player numbers when it's mostly a singleplayer experience. Of course the playerbase is going to keep declining when people start finishing the game or quit after getting stuck. I don't know why playerbase even matters for a game you're going to be buying to play alone for the most part.
The argument for elden ring is exactly how I feel. I feel like it is one of the best games I've played in the last decade. I put 120 hours into it at launch without touching anything else. I only have 2-3 hours at most a day to play so thats a lot for me. Im playing other games now but if/when they drop a DLC you bet your ass I'm dropping literally everything until the DLC is finished
Lol imagine ever checking the player count for a single player game.... sheep mentality at its finest
PoE dev Chris Wilson have said in a interview with Josh Strife Hayes, that 10.000 concurrent players should be enough to keep a MMORPG going if they are doing it right. PoE planned for 10.000 and have about 70-80.000 players, so they are running a successful Game in their opinion.
I miss the days where I can buy a complete game that isn't reliant on constant patches or a service controlled by the developers. One of the reasons why Skyrim still goes strong is because its pretty much updated by the community and the base game allows for so much to be expanded on.
Do you want to praise a Bethesda game or do you want to praise games that doesn't require constant patches, these two things aren't quite compatible.
Skyrim has had a lot of patches and very much needs a lot more, Bethesda just doesn't care enough to make them. It's one of the worst example you could have chosen.
I think a better example would be a fighting game like Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Was put out over 20 years ago and is still a game that I see gets lots of play today.
@@MerlinTheCommenter True, MvC 2 has had a lot of mileage, but it should also be noted that the game is Recycle City: There's like... 5 new spritesets or so in that game, tops. All the other characters are reused wholesale from previous games, so it's a game from a very different era. Last time they tried to make a new game that leaned heavily on reused assets was Marvel vs Capcom Infinite... and we all know how that ended. It just doesn't work out the same these days.
@@MerlinTheCommenter You are right, how is the mod support for that game?
In my humble opinion what happened to the industry here is: when games where awesome and had an attached online viability some gamers complained that the online aspect of these games were lacking. They listened to the few and went balls to the wall with it and now this is the result. My question is how big is the online community for Minecraft for example, and from those sales what percentage is online being used? I think any company that focuses on no online aspect games will make a killing because lately I’ve been playing a lot of single player games, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m sure I represent a good percentage of gamers out there.
Yep. When I see what should be a single player game with an online requirement I give it a pass every time because I know the single player will be about 6 hours or so of content and then nothing to do at all. Games used to have 40+ hours of content for single player and we need to go back to that. Removing the mix is a good step forward on that.
Yup. Literally same thing happened with Warhammer 3 Total War. As apart of Sega’s overall marketing scheme they are trying to push online of those games to detriment of single player experience, both game wise and as a consumer(streamers etc getting early access while you’re a paying customer waiting on an update just a bad approach overall for any marketing id argue)
Reality is, go look at either coop or versus lobbies and like, maybe 5-10 games open right, total war games always been niche so typically have like 5000-10000 players but like…they’re obviously not playing multiplayer…but ya…keep pushing that angle of the game as if it’s a demographic even exists…mind blowing cos this started years ago but still being used as if was ever a successful marketing tool
Online games do well for a lot of variables, and so single player games, trying to push two into same consumer sphere is just mental tho as all very opposing variables in the end
This honestly reminded me of alot of things I forgot about…I’ve been thinking about why games seem like they aren’t fun anymore/the developers not having a good relationship with the consumers
True 2 very good points here. The golden age of games is over? Think about how much better generally/over all/ more consistently games were from say 2000-2015 or 2020. We need more soul and love in gaming today. Artistic truth etc
Couldn’t agree more with what was said about dedicating your life to a game. I used to be really into fighting games but I don’t want to spend my time dedicating my life to one game and miss out on so many great titles. I feel as a gamer it’s best to really dive in and experience as many as I can.
Yes, I dont want to live the game. Game is free time for me after work. I dont want to spend so much time learning new things, I use my brainpower at work, I dont want to waste it with game.
Many years ago I had seen a article about how the average age of a PC gamer was 32. For some reason the gaming industry keeps aiming their products at 15 year olds. On top of that, it is really easy to stay in contact with your games community today, much easier than it has ever been but game companies seem to go out of their way to REFUSE to give the player what they request. Usually, they seem to only give players what they ask for when there is an added fee. There has been a race to the bottom and cheap, ugly cell phone games probably didn't help because we went from World/Universe creating games to Battle Royal Cartoons. The gaming industry, just like the movie industry, they both deserve a massive collapse but, it's not like most people are going to start reading. It really too bad because I know I am a adult with no kids and money to throw at a worthwhile game but I guess people like me will have to keep our money.
I don't think players see dropping player number counts as a reason to not play a game, I think we often see it as vindication for already coming to the conclusion that a game sux. We are constantly pounded by people being paid to TELL us what is GREAT! and more often than not, they are always grossly over exaggerated. When a game gets so big and popular that pop culture is making tv shows about people playing that game or jokes about in-game material, that's when a game has reached the same height as World of Warcraft in it's prime. I think the pop in popularity on many of these games shows a desperation by the audience for a great game. FPS can be fun and are good to play with friends but they don't have the longevity of a MMORPG. FPS are also much cheaper to make, it comes back to profit and the short term gain. All a developer has to do is basically make a Unreal Engine 5 rehash of World of Warcraft and it would be a hit. They wouldn't need much innovation or creativity, just a detailed environment and some new lore. Stay connected with the audience and release additional content every 3 months. Paid in-game purchases should only be cosmetic or quality of life improvements. As long as the animation is not anime or overly cartoonish and the environment is not constantly gloomy, this game would succeed very quickly and have potential for a decade of sales IMO.
They aim for children so they can manipulate them easier. They are fucking sinister.
Well said!
Alot of Valve games have amazing longevity. Counter Strike. Dota. Team Fortress. L4D.
I think something that helps keep a game alive is how much access the community has to the game. Stuff like mod support. Community servers. Unofficial patches. Etc.
Look at games like Fallout or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. These are games kept alive because there is a community to create content for it that keeps it alive.
Great video! This is a topic my friends and I go back and forth on and when I was younger mmos were my favourite games to play but player count is so important because certain content is unplayable without people. I’ve started to go back to play solo player games. I don’t know what the answer for only online games but at least with single player only, I know that my fun is in my hands not in the need of others.
I miss games that lasted 4, 5 or 6+ years. I personally think hyper competitiveness and obsession with esports is killing off gaming for anyone who doesn't want to sit at their desk 12 hours a day. Its turned gaming into a thing where people watch it like its the nfl, not something normal people actually play often.
Albion Online. Best PvP game out there
It has nothing to do with pvp and esport. There is a huge community for single player games. It comes from companies trying to make their bucks efficiently, late game asks for a lot of ressources and having millions of monthly paid subscribers is very hard to do.
You don't need to sit at your desk playing Starcraft (even the good ol' Brood War isn't dead) 12 hours a day. It's all about who you play with. If you've never played, then go grab 5 friends that have never played and you can have a blast playing 3v3 with each other and keep switching up the teams. That people play competitively has little bearing on how you and your friends need to play. We don't feel like we need to drive all day just because Nascar and F1 exist. We don't stop playing sports just because people watch them. There are plenty of people that will go down to the park and play basketball once a week AND watch an NBA game once a week without those two things having much bearing on each other. Some other people only watch, and others only play without watching the NBA at all.
eSports regarding minigames is killing off gaming I would say. If eSports were like in SC be or SC2 era it's more than fine.
Thats really up to you, plenty games hold value years later. Might not be your style but GTA is a PERFECT example, they are still putting out new content regularly to a game thats 10+ years old. At the end of the day tho not every game has that option, to be a game people play for years on end. Only some stories/playstyles will fit that and make sense, other stories are done when they are done, for me personally The Last of Us was one of the most boring games i have ever played and the world LOVES it. Part of it is the game, the rest is on us as players to decide what we want to replay, because technically they can all be replayed as many times as we want.
I think greed of the investors (the suits) and the lack of heart/talent from a lot of developers now days are the reason for so many declines. I think it just comes down to they don’t make them like they used to.
It's not the lack of heart. It's the lack of leadership/backbone. Project managers in IT have either no technical background, or they bend their knee to budgeting/the customer and abandon good software principles.
Think about it. Most tech savvy people are introverts and shy conflict. Although I think this might be slowly changing. Being a nerd is not a niche anymore.
Firefall was a great game with a lot of neat systems and cool story. I enjoyed all my time I spent in it. I never feel like I waste time in a game as long as I enjoyed the time I was there.
Too bad Red 5 Studios themselves were a bit of a shitshow. I believe their lack of organisation and overall ability to pick a direction was what killed them and the game. I don't regret time spent having fun in that game, I do wish, however, that the game was still around.
A man of culture as well I see.
I enjoyed the beta version of Firefall but the release was meh.
I played a loot of Fairfail, and oter similar global agenda. Fun games.
@@ArantyrDarkhand Defending giant thumpers in Beta was nice.
Everybody joins in the fun >,
Did FIrefall actually ever release? I seem to remember logging into a beta that i backed cus i was pumped for the game but there never seemed to be anything to do so i would log out again.
As someone who started playing Darkage of Camelot in 2006, and logged on to the live servers as recently as 2022. All these games you've mentioned are thriving.
I think it comes down to saturation. You can really only master one MMO at a time due to the learning curves, grind required, and necessity to establish yourself in a guild or group to get anywhere decent. The answer to this is having some of the largest studios band together and create one TRUE massive MMORPG. Each studio contributes to different game mechanics, and maybe leads up the creative on different DLCs. Otherwise, people move around, they go where their friends go, and since the game market doesn't limit how many of these games can exist, it's hard to find "your" game sometimes when you find a good one but too many people leave and it becomes a barren wasteland of trolls and bots.
I fully agree. I am very hopeful for the riot MMO as they seem to be able to pull off making a version of a game and it being popular and even making popular multiplayer games like LoL, Valorant, TFT, LoR etc. If they can manage to pull of a great MMO, I can see it become the go to MMO for a lot of people and with its established stories and world already in existence and the connection people will have to the world after playing Valorant or LoL, I can see it being as big as if not bigger than WoW.
nah sounds like a shit idea
you just explained metaverse which is impossible to do (with current technology)
@@Sharigloo true, and definitely not Meta's metaverse, which would be littered with pay schemes. But something where multiple companies handle different aspects. This is definitely not the best example but think of a mall, it's one mall but a bunch of stores, and the success of each store actually depends on the success of all the other stores to keep the mall open, thriving, and populated, so their motivation to work together would be legit. But with all of those different companies, updates would definitely require some sort of offlining/onlining persistence management server that could hot-swap out parts without effecting the others. You're right that there's not (that I know of) the tech for this type of hot-swapping fractional persistent universe, but I'm sure 50 years down the road there will be tech we never dreamed of, built & programmed by A.I. most likely.
This vision of a multi-IP mega game is what the “metaverse” is supposed to be. Facebook/Meta will not be the ones in control of the metaverse. Their Horizon Worlds app looks horrible, gimmicky mandatory VR with motion controls, ripoff Mii avatars, and PS2 quality graphics.
I just have to say that Anthem is still one of the best looking last gen games made. Sooooo much potential
Could of been amazing the movement was so nice ☺️
@@jakejennings1639 Yeah the flight model was awesome, even the combat was perfectly okay just sad there was no real content at the end and the items were boring. They could have invested time to rebirth it easily in a few months but that AAA mindset is damn stupid most of the time.
I mean, for Elden Ring it makes sense, it's a single player game and most if not all Achievements can be gotten in one playthrough if you back up the save file. So it make sense that once everyone experienced the game, and done all they could, all that would be left would be modders, people who pvp, people who want to try all the mods coming out, people who want to do all the sidequests, and people who want to find all secrets and lore in the game.
getting defensive aren't you
I truly appreciate calling out the fact that the games that had strong starts doesn't mean that they are dead after a decline. I have seen too many great under rated games being removed. It isn't like we have the cartridges to allow for some of us to go back and play older games. Gaming has changed a lot over the years and I am worried that this kind of focus on player numbers will only hurt gamers of the younger generation by missing out. I don't even know if it is worth being a game collector in today's day and age
As a player of Runescape for 17 years, I can say that if I panicked every time I saw a sustained drop in concurrent players, I would have stress-induced ulcers permanently. I think Concurrent player counts simply shouldn't be the end all and be all of how well a game is doing.
The often overlooked thing in these sorts of discussions is the size of the industry itself. Video games only really entered the mainstream around 2006, at which point, it's consumer base exponentially increased in size.
What this means, in general terms, is that prior to 2006, more dedicated hobbyist (what you might call "hardcore" players" made up a much larger percentage of players than the do in 2022. The current market is dominated by casual players who typically have tend to have markedly different consumption habits.
You also have to consider that this massive influx of consumers developed an entirely different set of expectations and tendencies than their predecessors. Take the whole "games as service" model, for example. Kids who started really getting into games via consoles in the late 2000s early 2010s have little to no point of reference for how - say - online multiplayer games were traditionally conducted. Community servers and custom content weren't really something these kids had experience with as console games tended to favour curated developer content and matchmaking systems.
The rapid acceptance of microtransactions (cosmetic ones in particular), games as service practices and other such things isn't really all that hard to wrap your head around when almost two generations worth of people grew up with them and consider them "normal". The same could be said about spending only a month with any given game, as the luxury of hundreds of new, easily accessible games is a relatively new development.
Nah, gaming went mainstream way before that, Halo: Combat Evolved, introduced competitive FPS gaming to a new generation of casual gamers all over the world.
@@thebarbaryghostsf you mean Quake 2...damn you guys are young
@@johnirby8847 Quake 2 did not popularize competitive shooters on consoles. That was my point. PC gaming was still a niche scene at that time. I'm in the back half of my forties. I've been gaming since it started.
@@thebarbaryghostsf sorry man! I remember playing counterstrike and team fortress classic though and they were very popular
@@johnirby8847 totally. But if you compare player numbers of the most popular PC MP FPS games of that time and compare those to the numbers of Halo, it's pretty clear that game really broke gaming out to a far broader, more casual audience and in a big way.
It’d be cool to see a video on seasonal gaming declines. I feel like gaming always declines a bit in June-September because no new games really come out in this timeframe and people are usually doing more outside stuff (at least in the US)
Yea I came to comment on just this. Seasonality may be a factor so it'd be interesting to compare year over year numbers by month if that's available.
@@DaentiDees What!
Are you saying you don't go outside?
Or you don't play MMOs?
@@DaentiDees I mean the new DLC wasn't too bad....at least the devs are trying to fix it.
This is so weird, since this is a time when kids are free to play games for hours on end (school break). So you'd think there'd be a market there.
I agree. From my long time experience it always seems like things start to really pick back up around Halloween and even more as the Holidays approach.
Milking players relentlessly while faking progression is a dead end. Also, a lot of gamers have been finding jobs after 2 years of "work" from home.
I think that's an awesome distinction you made where a game being "dead" actually matters. In most cases it doesn't except for online-only games as a service. That's where a game dying really means something because when it does die, the server's gone and players can literally never play again. RIP Marvel Heroes Omega 😢
Several years ago a new MMO came out called Age of Conan. I was still in my gaming prime at the time and joined a PVP guild prior to its release. With pre-order the game was giving you early access. I think it was three days if memory serves. This guild I had joined setup a roster. You could put your name down and be teamed up. The goal was to get as far as possible before the actual release day. The guild leaders were very open. They weren't going to stop playing for the entire early access and I didn't take them seriously. I had to work the day the game went into early release. I figured I jump on after work, game all night, and catch up as teams shut down. By the time I got online we already had teams into the mid 20s and 30s. We literally had teams who did not stop playing for two days. Literally stayed gaming online leveling with the exception of short breaks. By the time the game released we already had teams at max level. And in that game there was only one zone you could go to to get the final levels to reach cap. And my PVP guild was right there waiting on you to pop in. And it was brutal. Everybody and anybody who wasn't guild and showed up in zone was KOS. It was so bad that guild members like myself who were behind the curve was openly targeted because of the guild association. When I finally made max level it was nonstop PVP. It was basically my guild against the entire server in this zone. Within about three weeks from date of official release we already had members saying they were moving on to their next game. By the first month the guild was all but dead. I lasted another month before I bailed on the game too. Was it a bad game? it had its points. But this game released without any real end game raiding content. So you either PVPed or you crafted. There really wasn't anything else. And after PVPing for hours every day you eventually just grew tired of it. And I'd be lying if I didn't say my guilds overly aggressive PVP stance probably caused premature number counts as players struggled to complete their final levels and also not having PVE raid content to tackle either. Why stick around in a game you are not enjoying?
These days every MMO seems to have the same business model. Micro-transactions. Most aren't required. But eventually you realize you want any chance to stay competitive you have to do micro-transactions. Whether it is because of gear or resources to make gear that simply aren't available other than as limited quest rewards.
Now I also hear rumors of GTA getting neutered. That it simply isn't the same game as its predecessors and is even targeted towards a different audience. And yeah, this is taking its toll on the gamers too.
But here is something else. I have games on my phone. Some of them have short sessions. Got five minutes to kill? Jump on the game on the cell phone. That leads to even less time on the consoles as I focus on just leveling up in the cell phone app game.
Part of the problem is that there are too many options for everyone. And you simply give it up.
I miss Marvel Heroes Omega so much! And I spent hundreds on it, too, so I was their target audience... :'(
RIP Darkspore. Down with EA, destroyer of studios and franchises
@@Spectreofwar i wish that game would come back...i would even pay a $20 month subscription fee if i had too..that was my main game....i need that back really badly.
I think that we can look at the increase of live service titles as a contributing factor to the decline of game sales. There are not enough new titles coming out because developers and publishers are wanting to make a game that will stay relevant and produce money for them 5 to 10 years down the road
I feel like the big issue is that live service games at launch are pretty much betas until the devs decide to actually add more stuff. Like, I haven't played a SINGLE live service game that felt completed at launch. They either don't have enough content, mechanics aren't rewarding enough and require literal hours do perform anything meaningful, or it's just straight up broken to begin with. The only game this year that felt complete for me personally was Elden Ring, which isn't a live service game. It's all there right from the gate, what you saw in the trailer for the game is what you get, and it doesn't try to be something it isn't. The devs knew that most people were going to do 1 or 2 playthroughs and then stop, and that's not an issue, because they take pride in the world they created, rather then being hyperfixated on min/maxing profits, unlike other games that shan't be named *cough* any game with battlepass bs *cough*
there are mobile pokomin go mariorun
I think what it comes down to is higher expectations plus lower attention spans. Also people are followers, if a game starts losing players others will follow. And playing a game, ESPECIALLY on PC (if it’s a pvp game) that has low playercounts brings higher chances of running into cheaters, some games with server lists don’t have this issue as bad as those that don’t. And lastly, overall popularity and streamers/content creators have an influence that’s growing day by day. I still like to go on older games like older cod games or battlefield games just to see what’s going on and i ALWAYS run into cheaters sometimes right away.
One more reason playercount decline: player skill. The longer a game is on the market, the better players get on average. But this also forms a barrier for new players, who might just not have fun playing at that skill level from the get go. Not everyone enjoys a game when loosing 20 times in a row quickly, without a chance to improve.
I find overall higher skill levels of players makes games less enjoyable. Everything just devolves into minmaxing and metagaming. I still remember the League of Legends beta days lol. Everyone was just doing stupid crap and had very little idea what to do and it was a blast.
Csgo 10 years later..one million players online at any time, what were you saying?
hello there elden ring pvp scene
Im bronze 5 in Heroes of the Storm, I just dont want to learn all heroes, because I dont want to invest the time for it. I just play for fun. But many players are dedicate to it. Its relax for me after Im tired from work, nothing else.
Basically why fortnite flopped
I have played over 1000 hours in Planetside 2 over the last 4 years. The playercount on this massive game rarely exceeds a few thousand. Yet, this community has become so close, every vet knows each other by name. (not usually for good reasons though lol) I would dump another 1000 hours into it even with as few players there are. Some games transcend the playercount argument by the most ridiculous of ways. TF2 is a prime example
Planetside 2 was a great ideiaof massive mmo
I loved Planetside 2 and spent 4 years in that war. I probably wouldn't have quit except for the cheating that became so prevalent.
Good games don't die.
I think what we're really seeing is that there are more games and potential experiences than ever before. When a game is released, numbers are high at first because people want to try something new, but, ultimately, they disperse to their favorite titles.
In my view this is true to a degree, I think it's more to do with how we discover new games these days, streaming... there's tons of people watching their favorite streamers playing the newest Early Access games on a daily basis for a week or two, maybe even just a couple of days, and then they move on to the next popular game to keep their viewers interested, sure there's streamers that play only a few games all the time, but they usually don't have the viewer counts as the ones that keep trying new games as soon as they can, again there are exceptions, and this creates a batch of other streamers to switch to the new game that the top 5 streamers are playing because then they themselves might get a boost in viewers.
Or "the something new" is not new at all
Let’s not mention games now are mostly around the 50-60 pound mark, not too mention the online for console players.
I also think the trend is bigger than just concurrent player count.
It's much easier these days to find a community to share your experience with, but that means a large community will see what you share and comment on it. Some positive, some negative. For some games, the min/max theory is done by "expert players", providing a template for other players to follow, unless they want to play more inefficiently than the rest, possibly stamping them as "bad players". This is especially true for the automation/base building genres (Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program etc). Even RPGs have it all figured out and the community having all this shoved in their faces the moment they enter said community. There isn't a lot of room for experimentation because people will tell you when you're being "bad".
I believe this hurts retention and joy. I certainly am constantly tempted at learning the "correct" way to play, since I often fall into the trap that I know the "real solution" is out there and I feel stubborn for not wanting to seek it out. This goes hand in hand with concurrent player counts, as people will see it as a metric for other people's joy of the game, and if they aren't enjoying it, they certainly can't as well. We're not open to the experience at hand, unless we have curators telling us what is fun or not, and concurrent players seems to be a data curator of fun-ness or "relevance"
I don't know how the experience is for a lot of other people but I know that when I stopped playing wow so much I had a lot more time to go back and play the single player story driven games that grinding constantly on wow kept me from trying out and I gotta say I really really enjoyed getting a chance to do that. Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Cyberpunk, Jedi Fallen Order, Death Stranding, Resident Evil Village. So many games that I missed out on over the years for the sake of neverending grinding in one game that just really isn't that fun anymore. I still like Battlefront 2 but haven't been able to play it in awhile due to current setup limitations. Playing sitting ten feet away from a 65 inch tv in my living room isn't really conducive to playing those kinds of games well.
Just started rdr2 and rdr1 both are so amazing I can’t put them down
@@bahhumbug5467 I never played part 1 but 2 was incredible. Insanely immersive at 4k. I'm partway through death stranding and assassins creed black flag right now lol
@@patrickmcgovern4004 if you have a pc or something I really reccomend it the undead nightmare mode is so cool. Is death stranding fun? I’ve had it for awhile but it got so boring for mee
@@bahhumbug5467 I'm coming back to it after talking a break for awhile. Got better when I got to the point where you can get vehicles so you move a little faster and aren't constantly having to work at keeping your balance. I've got a 5600x/3070ti pc. 4k 60fps is doable in almost every game I've played on it.
So true.. Shamefully I admit I am addicted to League (LoL), same map, same champs, same play style, samrle grind, same frustrations, 8-12 hrs a day before. One day I just didn't felt playing and tried an indie game I bought, IT WAS THE BEST FEELING EVER since the day I started playing video games. I didn't realize at the time that too much of one game is unhealthy, you forget the joy of just playing A Game for Fun. I still like League but I'm not gonna waste a day or even my off time just to feel frustrated after a match. Sometimes I have withdrawals when I don't play League for a period of time and honestly to me its fine, I'm just not bothered wholly if I loose a match. At the end of the day, if its FUN then I play if it isn't I find others to replace it. Also I'm backed up on Indie games and I don't the time to play them all, I'm getting too old for this and I'm still in my mid 20s.
I feel like there is something missing in this analysis: Hype and Twitch. If a game is hyped up one might give it a try even though it's not really for that person. In that case her/she will drop the game rather early because it either isn't really their cup of tea or because the next big hype came along. I feel like Twitch has put this hype cycle on steroids over the last few years with streamers constantly chasing the next hype because it gets them views or they got sponsored to play it and viewers getting influenced to play a game because all the streamers playing it. Don't have numbers to back anything of that up though.
In other news, Titanic has declined 99.9% in viewership since it was released in 1997.
In my experience, I have almost never come across a truly "dead" game. I mostly play older games because of my shitty laptop and personal preference and even with games that are over 10 years old there are still people playing. To be fair, the vast majority of games I play are single player and when I do play multiplayer it is with specific friends in private lobbies so it doesn't matter how many other people are playing (there are always other lobbies too though).
It really hurts my soul to see how disgustingly corporate gaming has become. It's supposed to be just a fun hobby, but God forbid everything we enjoy isn't milked to the last cent by people who have zero passion for what they are producing, but as long as it makes them money they will keep shitting it out en masse. There are thankfully lots of (usually) smaller devs out there that still make games for gamers by gamers, it is unfortunately very clear that gaming has been claimed by greed and it shows in both the types of games that are being produced as well as the people that are playing them.
games were made by gamers for gamers. Now games are made by overworked devs for suites in an office.
@@SirCanuckelhead _Some_ games were made by gamers for gamers. There has always been games made by overworked devs for suits in an office going back all the way to the Atari days.
The only real difference these days is that a couple of guys in a garage can't compete with hundred-million-dollar AAA budgets. But if you (the player) are willing to forego the photorealistic graphics and effects that's expected from the AAA studios, there are still great games - likely hundreds if not thousands - produced every year by independent studios.
We get more great games in a year now than we got in the entire decade of the 1990s, simply because there's a lot more developers out there doing great things. The converse of course is that we also get a lot more utter horse shit every year now, because 80% of everything is crap and that ratio doesn't deviate much no matter how you define "everything".
But unfortunately we don't get any more time in a day, so several times more games at that 80% ratio means several times more opportunity to find the crap games instead of the gems, given the same (relatively) fixed amount of time we have available. So we rely on reviews and player counts and Steam recommendations and whatever other metadata to try and narrow the field of possibilities and hope that we find a game we like out of that pseudo-curated list.
But lets say you insist on sticking with the AAAs. Are you doomed to terrible games forever? Well no, not really. 80% of everything is crap, including AAA games. That means 20% are not crap. That may not mean great - could just mean passable, but a few will be great games.
So how to identify those? Well for starters, just ignore the peak concurrent players. Its a stupid metric. Every AAA game gets hyped to shit, and any game that gets hyped to shit will have an initial massive spike whether it deserves to have one or not. What you really want to look at is the player base _after_ the initial spike has hit and crashed. And even then you want to look more at the _stability_ of the player base than the absolute count (though the latter isn't entirely irrelevant). A game that has 10k on a near-constant basis for months at a time is likely going to be better than a game that runs 5k most of the time even if it spikes to 50k for a couple weeks every three months (indicates they have a rapid but ultimately kind of weak patch cycle).
Another hint: Just ignore gacha. There are a lot of games out there that are monetized via a gacha system which turns a lot of people off. But if you can restrain yourself from playing that lottery, a lot of them are actually quite good in their own right. Of course if you don't have the self-control to avoid the gacha then you're SoL so YMMV on that one. (Same goes for any microtransactions really. Gacha is just the most generally aggressive and annoying form that tries to abuse people with gambling addictions, if not generate them.)
@@altrag If there was a way for every gamer who found the best indie experience of their life to donate along the lines of several hundred quid to their favorite dev it would revolutionize the industry overnight. Yet today we have multiple high profile completely gratis successes with the devs receiving nothing back but 'positive word of mouth'. As if that pays their bills.
@@jshtng78 "Several hundred quid" is rather uncommon, but we do have a way for every gamer to "donate" to the devs - its called purchasing the game.
I have no idea what you're referring to when you speak of "high profile completely gratis successes". If you mean free-to-p(l)ay then sure those exist, but those aren't "completely gratis" by any stretch of the imagination. Even if _you_ play without ever paying a single dime, it just means you're being subsidized by some whale somewhere.
The F2P business model is (intentionally) rather complicated in the vast majority of cases, but it works _really, really_ well. Especially the models that include some form of loot boxes or gacha mechanic to hook into that gambling mindset. There's a reason why so many companies are going F2P despite being "completely free" in theory.
Of course if you don't mean F2P then I have no idea what you're referring to. Maybe you're in a niche and have a different idea of "high profile" than I do, but I can't think of many games of any profile that are completely free. A few, but not many. And most of those few are tiny experimental things that the dev just didn't think they'd make money on anyway. Some are actually not bad, but hardly what anyone would classify as "high profile".
@@altrag Oh but that's where you're wrong. You do not need any expensive investment or large team to create a good game. Minecraft is the best example of that (which beat GTA V by almost a hundred million). You can find countless good games made my small teams, I stopped buying AAA garbage years ago, all I buy these days are promising indie titles, or the few exceptional AAA games. All you REALLY need is a good game. AAA does not offer you good games, they offer you good looking games (very few rare exceptions of both good looking and good game). What you need is a creative mind and the right people to bring it to reality. Chasing after trends like "I'll make the WoW killer" or "my game will be the next PUGB" or "I'll make a better Minecraft" or whatever. It's all worthless to chase after a trend. If you want to make something good, you need to be the start of a trend.
I love this type of videos that do a deep dive into a specific pattern in the gaming industry, and you've done a fantastic job in this one. I'd love to hear your thoughts on hacking in games as well, considering how much of an issue it has become in recent times.
Boting is a worse issue. Hacking can be mitigated or stopped with server restrictions. But botting...is impossible to eliminate, it's a constant battle and does far more damage long-run than hacking.
@@joshanonline I don't see how you can prevent hacking via the server at all. If you want to understand why it's nearly impossible, watch the recent video Garbaj made on this topic. We're heading in a direction where hacks will become completely undetectable by software. And that, IMO, is much worse than bots.
@Qettesh I didn't mean for him to analyze why humans do it. I'm just curious about his perspective on how that will change the gaming industry in the future, and explore any ideas on how to combat it.
@Qettesh you shouldn't be surprised, because it's still a $300+ billion industry. Anything that rakes in that much money will be sustainable, at least for a while.
Enjoyed the intelligent overview -- as you say, it's possible to really love a game but still not want to play it every day forever after. As the saying goes, "Too much of anything, by definition, is still too much". I wonder if we'll eventually see some kind of shift back toward more finite, "one and done" games, with the very popular ones spawning a series of finite sequels? I guess we'll find out ...
I've played Minecraft and only Minecraft all my life and am not bored with it in the slightest
There are many new games that have 'amazing' graphics. But, I'm still sticking to Banished, DW8XL, and Minecraft just because of its non-existent endgoal and no competition. Just play whenever I want. Sometimes I play 15 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes, and sometimes can even more than 4 hours (If I do have the time)
And that is where the problem comes. Most of new games recently put an emphasis to FOMO and competition. Making the player stressed out and not having fun. There is a study that even said that some hardcore gamers got a burnout/phobia to their "fav" Games.
It's really hard being a modern gamer when you grew up in the 90's. The industry doesn't even look the same anymore. Now, majority of games have paid dlc and MTX. I can't help but feel that anyone who spends money on MTX are getting ripped off because games in the past never had cash shops. Everything was included in the price of the game. If a game I want to play has MTX I don't play it. If everyone did the same we wouldn't have MTX and our hobby would be in a much better place.
The first rpg I ever got addicted to was ff and phantasy star. I played wow for 18yrs, so glad to finally be free of addicting games.
This is fully correct. I am a old school gamer, I play ty the Tasmanian tiger. Rocket power Beach bandits, blood Rayne, all kind of shit. I full on agree with you, today's games are being monetized hard as hell...
I knew games were going to hell when cyberpunk 2022 failed. People don't understand that this game was being made during the golden age of gaming. And was ruined because of how ambitious it was, leading the investors to force the game to come out early, agianst the fans and devs wishes. Absolutely sad.
I'm gonna be a trucker soon, so this shit is whatever at this point.
blame kids using their parents money
UT99,Red Alert 2, Doom with GZDoom client Total Annihilation,TASpring etc.
Wtf is mtx?
I think it's actually a much bigger problem in general. Everything 'has to be' measured that eventually leads to a bunch of vanity metrics. It obscures what really matters and it basically impedes the growth/development of a product. I've seen this multiple times in my workplace (startup company) and I can see this happening in other industries.
"Vanity metrics" is a great term, I hope I remember to steal that.
@@JackTGreat Ditto. Vanity Metrics made a job at a bank I had as a network guy impossible to do because they implemented buncha crap to keep track of meaningless metrics and shit so the management team could pretend, looking at this data, that they knew what was going on....they DIDNT! None of Management could do OUR jobs so they should just be happy we outperform their expectations. They implemented a reporting system that made something that might take 100 mouse clicks turn into 1,500 mouse clicks. "ITS ALL ABOUT CLICKING, MAN!" As I said at a big meeting being they only one with balls to tell our bosses they made out jobs needlessly more difficult. Make everything more complicated and difficult for no reason, but expecting none of these changes to cause a slow down in productivity...That is pretty much every manager at any company big and corporate enough
EQ1 is still getting expansions for its small user base... It released in 1999
I personally think these are the issues.
1) split screen is very rare, can't play with your friends or siblings on one TV
2) campaigns are becoming an after thought to the online play
3) lack of diversity with types. Computer gaming has way more options because small developers can take risks bigger studios can. I'd like to see xbox take more chances on the smaller devs. Even if they're download only.
4) voice acting really hasn't improved since original playstation days. I get that timing is less controllable in a game than say a movie....but that's why I think actors should pitch lines as if they're talking to the player rather than just reading lines.
I never play a game based on playercount. As long as I can play the game normally there's enough players for me. I don't care about how popular something is before I play it
Its not such a big deal for those kinda team deathmatch genre of games.. call of duty .. fortnite etcetera ... as long as you can que into a match .. those games play exactly the same . However for mmorpgs its vastly different , the game can sometimes cease to exist if thousands and thousands of players just quit. And it affects the world /economy
@@Jradz8709 yeah I would say that kinda lands on the side of not playing the game normally anymore, to be fair. It's just alot more impactful with big player count serves
What about games that require players?
@@Corion2121 again that affects normal play..
The thing with Elden Ring is that once you've beaten it....you just don't want to go through that anxiety ridden hell again. ;)
The thing is not everyone likes Elden Ring
Spoke like a true non FromSoft player lol
I played minecraft for a month after my Elden Ring platinum.
the world is boring an empty it was inevitable as soon as they said it would be open world
Just like me,once I finished it I went for NG+ 😂
I took a 2 year break from Elder Scrolls Online and just started playing again a couple weeks ago. I couldn't believe how populated the most common starting areas and mid level areas are (I know it has level scaling). Got right into some guilds and having a blast seeing so many players in every area of the game world.
You chose a bad time to rejoin I quit the game because everything is getting nerfed
@@fsu7482 Oh no. I might have to make minor adjustments to my old builds. Thats part of every single MMO lol
@@humorinpolitics56 well have fun then I dropped a lot of cash on it so at some point I'll come back but right now I'm so done
I tried playing it. I was told I was the chosen one only to discover a lot of other chosen ones.
@@hrlrl9309 lol
I think part of the problem is the increased attention to how much money games make. Instead of the traditional they release a game, you buy the game, they release a sequel, etc. now games are much more microtransaction or subscription based so the game just gets hard to sustain for a lot of players especially if you’re just a casual gamer as an adult playing in our off time. It’s hard to justify a $15/month subscription for something like world of Warcraft when I don’t actually have that much free time to play it. So instead you play one game for several months and when it’s not justifying whatever you have to pay for it anymore you play something else
One thing not mentioned with the declining player count is the player experience in-game.
A good example of this is New World. I jumped back in not too long ago after playing it a bunch on launch then leaving for various reasons. The game still has a lot of the aspects that I liked, and some of the ones that I didn't weren't as noticeable, but a big issue that I noticed quite fast is that the world was empty. Outside of the towns, I rarely ever saw another player. And for a lot of MMO style games, there not being anyone else around to play with or interact with causes the experience to degrade. A good example was a quest I was on to kill the big bad in a certain area. I tried, and failed, three times because I was unable to kill it alone, and that became an issue because there was no one to help. Local was dead, company was dead, region, and whatever else.
So a game that is designed to be played with other people really sufferes when there's no other people to play it with.
Hey just commenting to remind you that you have free server transfer tokens and can go to a more populated server for free! Don’t waste your time on a dead server my dude trust me Ive been there it’s trash! Progression happens so much faster when there are people around to help you!
I can't speak for MMO's but honestly even then player count doesn't affect experience if lobbies can be consistently filled. I play several relatively obscure games that have a tiny player base in comparison, and I still manage to have a good time. Sometimes it doesn't even feel any different if there's a lot of loyalty from the game's players.
Another issue with MMOs is that because most of them are trying to sell you something ongoing other than the subscription, they inevitably attract scammers, farmers, botters, etc. The only MMO I've been a part of that hasn't been scummed up and ruined by these influences were probably WOW and LOTRO. I still remember the hype and excitement I had participating in ArcheAge's alpha, and the utter garbage it became on release due to scammers, botters, and company microtransaction decisions.
@@dg4720 Unless you're from Australia where all our servers have merged into 1 final server.. Sure we can transfer to a US server with population but it also comes with a ~ 250-270ms+ latency cost.
@@Twizted86 okay and that server isn’t dead so really doesn’t apply to what we were talking about right?
There's also the monetary aspect, many have a finite budget when buying games and with many games being live services the fear that a game will die quickly and force the player to find something else is an ever present thing.
Makes me feel good I put games down and got into IT, “a decision to do one thing is a decision to not do literally everything else” I felt that
If you felt that, go check Søren Kierkegaard's take on anxiety and on the anxiety that freedom brings. Hipe you get interested in it!
Remember when people used to line up outside a GameStop for hours..
Two things I want to bring up:
1. I have been playing New World again recently and honestly enjoying it a lot. Sure it's player count has gone down but there is more than enough people around for me to have found a great guild and just enjoy playing. Devs seem to be sticking with it so it will become a good MMO eventually just like ESO and ff14 which had rough launch or terrible even.
2. I wish more games did what Path of Exile does, the developers are aware people are not going to be playing their game everyday all year. Their focus on numbers and retention is how many people come back every league/patch (These happen every 3ish months). So I can play the crap out of POE for like a month and if I am done I do not feel like I am missing anything and know I can come back in 2 months for a new patch and there are no game systems trying to force me to keep playing.
Path of Exiles’ lazy game design of *revolving door META* is probably one of the _worst_ examples you could have picked.
There are 483 gems in 3.16. *How much more bloat* does the game need when so many gems are _useless???_
*GGG created the problem of power creep* in the first place so they are constantly buffing and nerfing old stuff, and keep adding new stuff to bait people to keep coming back but the fundamental problems still remain:
*GGG doesn’t respect your time.*
Compare to free updates like _Terraria, Minecraft, Satisfactory_ where your progress isn’t lost on updates because some dev gets off on artificially increasing difficulty due to no life streamers whining the game is too easy.
There are good games out there, Path of Exile just isn’t one of them.
@@MichaelPohoreski Depends on your definition of a good game. By your definition of a good game. All live service games are terrible.
I think POE does respect my time. There are no daily login rewards, there is no endless loot grind like in MMO's where it could take you weeks or months to get the gear you want. I can get a character to endgame and "complete" to my satisfaction in a week. And then unless I want to try another build or have some goal to do I come back the next league for a fresh start which I look forward to.
Also comparing POE to games like Terraria, Minecraft, and satisfactory is a bit odd. It is like saying That Chocolate donuts taste terrible because they are not like strawberries. They are sooooo different.
They do have power creep but so does every other Online RPG Style game. Most other games just create a treadmill. So "Ope look a new raid in wow so now you can get to Gear score 700 instead of 600." I am not saying I dislike this system but it is not much better honestly in fact in some ways I would argue it is worse and lazy.
Also you can play on standard where your progress is not lost. But If you have issues with POE's league system then honestly POE may not be the game for you. Same way how someone may not enjoy the endless loot treadmills that MMO's have they do not usually play those games.
@@truton1060 I've been playing PoE since Open Beta. Your statement "just play Standard" is utter nonsense. PoE's revolving door of lazy game design effects standard whether players want it or not. The passive skill trees, the Atlas, gems, and uniques items have been reset/nerfed *multiple times.*
i.e. How many times has Spark been nerfed and buffed???
For the record I tend to agree that most live service games are terrible. There are exceptions such as Guild Wars 2.
*GW2:* Expansions are additive.
*WoW:* Expansions are subtractive.
You missed the point to other games. Those games _do_ respect your time. PoE doesn't.
@@MichaelPohoreski I disagree, but it sounds like we are fundamentally different players. The revolving door meta is what I enjoy about POE. This last patch they did no changes and I played the least amount of last league than I have any league since I started playing 4-5 years ago. So you think it is bad but that is one of the things that keeps me coming back. So that "lazy game" Design revolving door is one of the main things that brings me back. It may be simple (I would not say lazy as game balance and design are hard) but it works for me.
I have accepted that the ever changing Meta is a feature of POE and I enjoy it. Other games where nothing changes and the same builds are always played is just boring for me.
But like I said we seem to be enjoy different things but just because you do not enjoy something does not mean it is bad. Like I do not enjoy GW2, I have tried to get into it at least 3-4 times but the character builds and playstyles are boring for me. Does that mean guild wars 2 has a bad system? No it is just not for me.
@@MichaelPohoreski If you're this bitter, you should consider not playing it any more. Like drinking from a dry well -- if the dopamine drip has tailed off, try something else.
I've recently switched to playing single player campaign games and really enjoy them. Trying to keep up with what weapons are meta or Trying to learn a new map is exhausting. I recently just downloaded all the splinter cell games and I'm having a blast.
I like what you're going for, but the key killer to most of these games is a combination of microtransactions being way too spendy, the devs taking way longer for updates than ever necessary, their reluctance to patch bugs, and them refusing to use better anticheat or actually personally review cheat submissions. for small, 5 people groups i understand most of this. but big companies have time and time again ripped that 90% of players off entirely.
one of the biggest reasons that many people seem to forget is that we live in an ever evolving world, so new games keep popping up and people just move on. compared to the 90's and early 2Ks era, there's usually a big gap between the current game and the next new game. now? not so much, you barely played it for a few months, then there's a news that a new online game is coming up.
Simple reason, single player games were always made to be played within a time frame, multiplayer games were usually played for 2-3 years after its release until a new game came out that would replace it. MMO were always the same from the beginning, they were long term games in a online world, some people technically kept playing because it was supported by content. However ever since steam started using statistic we assume there has been some issues, but it's not the case, there was just not enough data to back it up since mostly people were not connected online. Microtransaction and grinding has been something to keep people out of the game, either you pay more to have the content now to avoid grinding, or you grind to have something later on, and that stuff started with EA, 2K, ubisoft and then Fortnite came in and said hold up let me do this to a whole new level with a battlepass, paying 10-15$ for a month of two month to unlock cosmetic features, basically telling the player they reward you for playing the game on a daily basis or if you play it enough, however the issue I have with this is you are basically paying 120 to 180$ a year to play a game...... and its been lucrative that almost every game has had a version of that implemented it. Some single player games are still the most fun till this day and will forever be, because there isn't a grind or microtransaction that affect the gameplay, its only the multiplayer the aspect, I would rather much have a sinpler/coop player campaign than an multiplayer, the experience is not the same, if you play on PC we do not have an issue with games haha, its mostly on console! So the only decline i can see and it make sens will be multiplayer games.
First, Fortnite didn't create that "whole new level thing with the battlepass", WoW had that and the numbers behind it a decade before Fortnite was even a thing. Fortnite and Minecraft had/have the advantage of being on nearly every platform, mobile, console, pc....and also a format with a very low barrier of entry that made it possible for kids to play as well. As far as PC vs Console, they have different player bases, and there are some conversions as people become more serious about their gameplay...games like Division 2 that has seen a huge decline, mostly because of other titles with better PVP, but there has been a considerable population of Division 2 console players moving to PC, but I'd say overall, Division 2 player is stronger on console.
Micro transactions hurt every game, but they're revenue driven and ultimately has to exist if people want DLCs and new content in subscription or "server pop" decline.
MMOs will always carry a similar format to entice people play with other people...but also the value in interaction and developing relationships...many turning into actual real-life relationships. It's a completely different experience than matchmaking with some random, one named "Orange_Peanut6969" in a battle royale and you never see the person in the game twice...It's just a different experience entirely.