Topic: Consumers were mostly playing older games in 2023, report suggests

When game industry asks extra money to play buggy games a day earlier only to delete your save after release or ship games with ugly character designs and bad mechanics and call you a bigot for not playing those or have an online requirement that could turn your game unplayable in a few years... I can see why people would go back to older games. Especially as tech seems to have stagnated recently. Just compare the difference between FF7 and FF10 and that was just three years! And now games from 10 years ago and last month look the same.

I really think the reason for that, if true, is the quality of some games when they release. I know not every game is like that, some modern games release in good states and are super amazing, but I have heard way too many stories online of people being shipped triple-AAA, bug budget games with lots of bugs and technical issues and being unsatisfied with the final product. I think because this has happened way too times and people have grown sick of it, people have gone to older games instead. While I am sure there have been older games that have released with issues, I feel like that those had a tendency to be released with no problems and were finished games upon release. I also think it could be the increase of remasters too…Nintendo has released a ton of remasters of their old games onto the Switch, a lot of which have been loved and beloved classics that everyone remembers, so they might go back to revisit those instead than buying a new modern game that has a 50/50 chance of being botched or releasing in a poor state.

Not to say I am against modern games and that classic/retro games are the best. No, I do play modern games too and have found a lot of them to be amazing (one of the games in my signature is a modern game that I’ve found super good but addicting) but I think back then releasing games in poor states or leaving them incomplete was less frequent, and no one had trouble with buying games upon launch without worrying whether they were bad or not. I think this stuff has happened too much so now people revisit classic/retro games or older games from maybe a decade ago or purchase game remasters instead, since they likely know that the game will still be good.

I’ve found myself playing older games (from 20+ to 19 years ago) and finding a lot of fun in those. I don’t know, a lot of the new games releasing this year don’t interest me. They look fun and cool, but I don’t have the need or urge to go out and buy them. I just stick to those aforementioned older games and a few modern titles I already like playing that are good quality. There is maybe one modern game I do want to get in a few more years, but I don’t quite know if it’ll actually be good, given how game studios sometimes hype big budget games up and they release to mediocre reception, which has made me a bit skeptical.

@Pastellioli a year isn’t a good enough duration to judge this kinda thing especially based on a vague report like this. I’d say 5 years
minimum is good enough.
Older games is also relative, and can be a pretty vague term. People spending 2023 playing games from 2022 isn’t something worth gawking at. Even if it’s something like mid-2010s games I’d still say that’s not reliable enough data because of things like PS plus and game pass existing that allow easier access to “older” titles. In this current ecosystem, it’s also easier than ever to have a library composed of 90% games that aren’t from the current year. If this report came out ten years ago and was alluding to older gen titles, it’d have meaning. In this current climate, saying people play gta v and Fortnite more often than they play single player games with a set define time for their campaigns is not really a shocking statement.
There’s nothing to really look at so just move along, friend.