Why old games never die, but new ones do

Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.

I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games").

You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?

Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.

If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?"

I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.

One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?!

This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.

The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.

Copyright is pretty broken at this point; the drop to zero cost for duplicating bits broke a lot of assumptions 30-odd years ago and we've been slow walking the consequences ever since. AI kind of punched it in the gut, but it was already wobbling. There's been a bunch of attempts to patch things, but there's a significant shear between the common understanding of copyright law, the actual current caselaw, and what you can get away with as either an individual or a corporation. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better--a lot of people have a lot of money invested on things that are increasingly divorced from the economic and social forces at work--but I anticipate a realignment similar to the post printing-press era. (Which took decades for the consequences to ripple out, so we'll probably be at this a while if that's at all comparable.)

Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?

Scaling back copyright to the initial 14 years, renewable once - would help a lot.

Nah. That's a good response in the surface, but people are REALLY good at archiving things that can be archived.

I remember once going to a flea market and seeing some obviously pirate CDS labaled "Every Sega Genesis Game" next to "Every SNES Game". I ended up getting Neo Geo and Neo Geo CD game. Plenty of stuff in those collections that was barely played when it was released and people don't really remember.

Someone talked in this thread about how nobody is playing "Madam Fifi's Whore-House Adventure". It's available.

https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...

From the article:

"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."

This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.

It was more of a monoculture.

https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY

That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.

Several of the games in your list are well over a decade old. How old is too old to be "new"?

Very few of those games you've listed are new games.

Newer than cs 1.6, sure, but very few of them are under 5 years old.

    Fortnite: 2017
    Apex legends: 2019
    Valorant: 2020
    Overwatch 2016 
    COD: Not sure which version you're talking about.
    League: 2009
    Dota 2: 2013
    Roblox: 2006

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrY...

Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:

Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)

Apex Legends: February 4, 2019

Valorant: June 2, 2020

Overwatch: May 24, 2016

Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release

League of Legends: October 27, 2009

Dota 2: July 9, 2013

Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)

Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...

At first I did a double take because I thought you said there are still people playing Phantasmagoria.

Map editors and modding have always been pretty common for both turn-based and realtime strategy games, and the entire MOBA genre originated from RTS mods. Bethesda RPGs have active modding communities in part because they always need community-made patches to be playable. Doom and Quake and Unreal had very fruitful mod and fork ecosystems with offspring that went mainstream like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Several simulation games shipped with the Gmax 3D modeling program.

To play Doom: The Dark Ages, a video card with raytracing and 8 GiB of VRAM is min spec. So AMD's advice is already out of date.

Cheating is a huge problem, yes. To solve it you need to implement Trusted Computing at the hardware, firmware, and OS level. In the short term, more and more games will follow the lead of Apex Legends and just ban Linux players, because the very flexibility of Linux that make hobbyists prefer it also enables rampant cheating.

In the long term, devices like Pluton will make the PC a locked-down platform and the whole question will be moot. Future PCs will just be Xboxes that can run Excel. User-created content, including mods and custom servers, might be re-enabled in such an era for some games provided there are enough protections against shenanigans (piracy, cheating in multiplayer).

Wait, what are you talking about ?

Because AMD also recently announced the cheapest (?) new midrange GPU with 16 Go of VRAM :

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/amds-radeon-rx-9060-xt-want...