Everybody loves new games. That's a truism of the industry; it's
something they depend on and market heavily. Don't miss out, they tell
is; buy the game now before everybody jumps ship to the next big
thing.

Except... apparently that truism isn't quite as true anymore. Steam's
Year in Review shows that only 15% of the total time spent on games
was spent on games released in 2024. More than a third of their time
was spent on games eight or more years old.

The thing is, new game SALES haven't really decreased. But people are
spending more time playing their older titles. And games that -just a
generation ago- would have been declared obsolete and ancient still
have quite a draw to them.

There are all sorts of reasons for this and, honestly, I think that
the sheer number of bots grinding games like TeamFortress and
CounterStrike for gambling tokens probably skews the numbers quite a
bit. But the popularity of SteamDeck, the huge influx of free or
highly-discounted older games, and the malicious monetization of
modern titles probably are all influential too.

I certainly have no gripe with this; I've been championing older games
for years! Go older games; strut your stuff! These new-fangled
releases ain't got nothin' on you!

Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
older games you played?

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:51:34 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
>were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
>older games you played?

My most played games on Steam are from 2000-2010 or so. But I am also
playing a bunch of freebies and I don't really have any idea when they
came out. I doubt any of them came out in 2024.

I never played a 2024 game in 2024 I don't think. I will likely not
play a 2025 game in 2025. I don't buy games from the big studios
anymore. They don't make games that I like. I do buy indie titles, but
even then, I buy them when they are on sale. And then they sit in my
library until I get around to playing them.

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:10:12 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:51:34 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
><spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
>>were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
>>older games you played?
>
>My most played games on Steam are from 2000-2010 or so. But I am also
>playing a bunch of freebies and I don't really have any idea when they
>came out. I doubt any of them came out in 2024.
>
>I never played a 2024 game in 2024 I don't think. I will likely not
>play a 2025 game in 2025. I don't buy games from the big studios
>anymore. They don't make games that I like. I do buy indie titles, but
>even then, I buy them when they are on sale. And then they sit in my
>library until I get around to playing them.

I played an unusual amount of new games this year. Well, unusual for
recent years; back in the day it felt like I was getting and playing a
brand new game every week. But for a good while, until 2024, I was
focussing more on older titles.

But this year I spent a good amount of time (and money!) on games
released in 2024; 7 games to be exact (or 9 if you include the
truck-sim expansion DLC), all of which I played to completion. That
number goes higher if you include games "less than a year old when I
bought and played them" (such as the "System Shock Remaster", which
released in May 2023 but I played in January 2024). If you include all
of those, my total of "brand new" games goes up to almost a quarter of
_all_ the games I played in 2024.

Furthermore, the vast bulk of the games I played definitely fell into
the "less than 8 years old" category, with only 9 games released
earlier than 2016. The oldest game I played fully in 2024 was "Jedi
Knight", released back in 1997.

But like I said, that's actually fairly unusual. After having spent so
much time in previous years with older titles, I was ready to get to
cutting-edge games again, so I splurged a bit. Now, having caught
myself up, I'm ready to submerge myself back in the old.

[Well, except for those silly truck-driving sim
expansions. Those I'll always buy Day One ;-)]

It's more difficult for me to say how much TIME I spent on these new
games in comparison to the older titles, though. Still, of all of the
games I played this year, there were only five I didn't play to
completion, and none of those were games released in 2024.

Of course, all this discounts all the games I fired up, puttered
around with for twenty or fifty minutes, then put away again. I do
that with a lot of my older DOS and Playstation games and never list
them in my monthly recounts since I don't consider those games really
"played". And then there's stuff like Doom; over the course of 2024, I
probably put in ten or twenty hours of play with that game, but it was
thirty minutes here and an hour there over the course of a year. That
happens with older games like "Civilization 1" or "Master of Orion"
too. It's a lot of "I can't think of what else to play, so I'll just
fire this old classic up to while away some time until I can think of
something better". It adds up, but doesn't get 'counted'.

But the overall TL;DR is that I played a lot of games and some of them
definitely came from 2024 :-)

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:04:11 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>I played an unusual amount of new games this year. Well, unusual for
>recent years; back in the day it felt like I was getting and playing a
>brand new game every week. But for a good while, until 2024, I was
>focussing more on older titles.
>
>But this year I spent a good amount of time (and money!) on games
>released in 2024; 7 games to be exact (or 9 if you include the
>truck-sim expansion DLC), all of which I played to completion. That
>number goes higher if you include games "less than a year old when I
>bought and played them" (such as the "System Shock Remaster", which
>released in May 2023 but I played in January 2024). If you include all
>of those, my total of "brand new" games goes up to almost a quarter of
>_all_ the games I played in 2024.

The System Shock remaster is on sale right now. It is in my wishlist
and I am thinking of getting it because I am in the mood to actually
play it. I would mix it in with all the giveaway games I got from you,
but that *still* will be sometime in 2025 for a game that came out in
2023!

That is as close as I could potentially come to playing a game in its
release year. I don't count freebies in this, I mean games I actually
purchased.

>Of course, all this discounts all the games I fired up, puttered
>around with for twenty or fifty minutes, then put away again. I do
>that with a lot of my older DOS and Playstation games and never list
>them in my monthly recounts since I don't consider those games really
>"played". And then there's stuff like Doom; over the course of 2024, I
>probably put in ten or twenty hours of play with that game, but it was
>thirty minutes here and an hour there over the course of a year. That
>happens with older games like "Civilization 1" or "Master of Orion"
>too. It's a lot of "I can't think of what else to play, so I'll just
>fire this old classic up to while away some time until I can think of
>something better". It adds up, but doesn't get 'counted'.

I do this as well. When I am in between games, I may fire up Master of
Orion or Master of Magic, or play a random map in Heroes of Might &
Magic 3 until I decide what to play 'for real' so to speak.

On Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:30:04 -0500, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>I do this as well. When I am in between games, I may fire up Master of
>Orion or Master of Magic, or play a random map in Heroes of Might &
>Magic 3 until I decide what to play 'for real' so to speak.

My first read-through of that comment was that you were firing up
"Master of Orion 3" as your go-to game, and my opinion of you dropped
drastically. Then I read more closely and I very much approve of your
choices ;-)

(Although to be fair, my own feelings on MOO3 are entirely based on my
playthrough of the release version of the game back in 2003.
Apparently the developers -and later the fans- have been working on
reclaiming that title, and it's no longer quite as bad as it was when
it first came out. So maybe it's worth playing nowadays and I
shouldn't automatically assume everyone who does so has no taste in
video games. Still, I've no immediate desire to see how much it has
changed; not when I still have the first two games of the series to
occupy me ;-)

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>
>Everybody loves new games. That's a truism of the industry; it's
>something they depend on and market heavily. Don't miss out, they tell
>is; buy the game now before everybody jumps ship to the next big
>thing.
>
>Except... apparently that truism isn't quite as true anymore. Steam's
>Year in Review shows that only 15% of the total time spent on games
>was spent on games released in 2024. More than a third of their time
>was spent on games eight or more years old.
>
>The thing is, new game SALES haven't really decreased. But people are
>spending more time playing their older titles. And games that -just a
>generation ago- would have been declared obsolete and ancient still
>have quite a draw to them.
>
>There are all sorts of reasons for this and, honestly, I think that
>the sheer number of bots grinding games like TeamFortress and
>CounterStrike for gambling tokens probably skews the numbers quite a
>bit. But the popularity of SteamDeck, the huge influx of free or
>highly-discounted older games, and the malicious monetization of
>modern titles probably are all influential too.
>
>I certainly have no gripe with this; I've been championing older games
>for years! Go older games; strut your stuff! These new-fangled
>releases ain't got nothin' on you!
>
>Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
>were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
>older games you played?

The Newest games I purchased this year:
System Shock Remaster (about 2/3rds of the way through I stopped, will
pick up again at some point)

Mechwarrior5 Mercs (did I think about 4 missions, then I no longer had a
functional mech, since it's all swarms of enemy attacks vs single you)

CyberPunk2077 (Have not even opened it)

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered (have not played yet, gonna have to get in
the mood for those controls)

Games I actually played:
Black Desert Online
Star Trek Online
Star Wars: The Old Republic
City of Heroes
Grim Dawn
Borderlands 2+3

Xocyll

On Tue, 24 Dec 2024 10:18:31 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>My first read-through of that comment was that you were firing up
>"Master of Orion 3" as your go-to game, and my opinion of you dropped
>drastically. Then I read more closely and I very much approve of your
>choices ;-)

I never bothered with the third game due to the poor reviews when it
released. I always have the original MOO installed, and yes, that is
the one I was referring to.

On 12/23/2024 10:51 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
> Everybody loves new games. That's a truism of the industry; it's
> something they depend on and market heavily. Don't miss out, they tell
> is; buy the game now before everybody jumps ship to the next big
> thing.
>
> Except... apparently that truism isn't quite as true anymore. Steam's
> Year in Review shows that only 15% of the total time spent on games
> was spent on games released in 2024. More than a third of their time
> was spent on games eight or more years old.
>
> The thing is, new game SALES haven't really decreased. But people are
> spending more time playing their older titles. And games that -just a
> generation ago- would have been declared obsolete and ancient still
> have quite a draw to them.
>
> There are all sorts of reasons for this and, honestly, I think that
> the sheer number of bots grinding games like TeamFortress and
> CounterStrike for gambling tokens probably skews the numbers quite a
> bit. But the popularity of SteamDeck, the huge influx of free or
> highly-discounted older games, and the malicious monetization of
> modern titles probably are all influential too.
>
> I certainly have no gripe with this; I've been championing older games
> for years! Go older games; strut your stuff! These new-fangled
> releases ain't got nothin' on you!
>
> Where do you stand? How many of the games that you played this year
> were released in 2024, and how did that compare in playtime to any
> older games you played?
>

According to the Steam profile I played 1 new game (2 if you count ER's
DLC as a game, it's bigger than a lot of games, but technically isn't.)
out of 12, so 8% (16%.) Technically EDF 6 which is the one game was
released 2 years ago, this is just an English re-release. Originally
Japanese only, but I had the patience to wait for this release, where
some don't and bought the Japanese edition 2 years ago because they
couldn't wait, despite not knowing the language beyond such words as
sushi and arigatou. So technically you could say I played no new games
this year.

I played a lot of games elsewhere besides Steam though, there might have
been an indy game or two that was 'new'. I was going to say Roboquest
might have been new, but nope, that was last year.

In 2023 I did play at least one new game - Baldur's Gate 3.

--
-Justisaur

ø-ø
(\_/)\
`-'\ `--.___,
¶¬'\( ,_.-'
\\
^'

Games actually released this year, probably only two:
Indika
Indiana Jones
I can't recall what led to buying Indika, some urge to try a new indie
game? Indiana Jones has been a major surprise though; I'd never have
purchased it at the retail price, but being available via gamepass and the
early lauds eased any entry concerns, and I've enjoyed it quite a bit.

Games I've paid full retail for were not in a playable state on launch
(cyberpunk & stalker2) but both appear to have made major strides (cyberpunk
is quite mature now), and another title I wanted to buy but not at full
retail, Alan Wake 2, is finally discounted and I've bought it: This trend
will continue no doubt: Balking at high release price, or balking at rushed
& unfinished state of titles, and waiting for ~1yr before buying.

My oldest title this year, the 15yr old console title Enslaved: Journey to
the West, I enjoyed immensely

rms

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

> But this year I spent a good amount of time (and money!) on games
> released in 2024; 7 games to be exact (or 9 if you include the
> truck-sim expansion DLC), all of which I played to completion. That
> number goes higher if you include games "less than a year old when I
> bought and played them" (such as the "System Shock Remaster", which
> released in May 2023 but I played in January 2024). If you include all
> of those, my total of "brand new" games goes up to almost a quarter of
> _all_ the games I played in 2024.

Damn, I thought the "System Shock Remaster" was a 2024 game. So that
would've been at least one game released this year I've played. Oh well,
it feels like they kinda did it to themselves. As I recall, they
announced a big patch in August of 2023 and then didn't release it until
2024. I had started the game, then waited for that patch and when it
didn't come out I just started playing in late 2023 or early 2024.

What's the stance on big mods though? Thinking of Fallout: London here,
it definitely came out this year but Fallout 4 is almost a decade old
now.

On Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:13:11 +0200, Anssi Saari
<anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> But this year I spent a good amount of time (and money!) on games
>> released in 2024; 7 games to be exact (or 9 if you include the
>> truck-sim expansion DLC), all of which I played to completion. That
>> number goes higher if you include games "less than a year old when I
>> bought and played them" (such as the "System Shock Remaster", which
>> released in May 2023 but I played in January 2024). If you include all
>> of those, my total of "brand new" games goes up to almost a quarter of
>> _all_ the games I played in 2024.
>
>Damn, I thought the "System Shock Remaster" was a 2024 game. So that
>would've been at least one game released this year I've played. Oh well,
>it feels like they kinda did it to themselves. As I recall, they
>announced a big patch in August of 2023 and then didn't release it until
>2024. I had started the game, then waited for that patch and when it
>didn't come out I just started playing in late 2023 or early 2024.
>

There was an interesting article.... lemme see if I can find it... oh,
here on PC Gamer of all places...
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/2024-has-been-one-of-the-most-fragmented-years-for-videogames-and-in-hindsight-i-actually-really-liked-that/

Anyway, it pointed out that unlike many previous years, 2024 didn't
really have a 'big game' that defined it. For instance, 2023 everyone
was talking and playing Baldurs Gate 3", and "Elden Ring" was the
thing in 2022. But 2024 felt sort of empty in terms of big-ring games;
it wasn't that they weren't any good games released, or big-name
games, but nothing really that EVERYONE seemed to be playing and
talking about. Which (and I can't believe I'm agreeing with PC Gamer
on this) I don't really think is a bad thing. If anything, it may mark
the end of the triple-A publisher's stranglehold on the industry. But
it does make 2024 feel less memorable than other years.

>What's the stance on big mods though? Thinking of Fallout: London here,
>it definitely came out this year but Fallout 4 is almost a decade old
>now.

Yeah, that's another issue. Because so many games are now designed
with multi-year life-cycles, supported by a slow trickle of DLC and
'seasonal expansions' it's hard to assign a date to a game. I played a
lot of "American Truck Simulator" this year, a game released in
2016... but most of that was exploring new content added in expansions
released in 2024. Throw in the gradual release of games through early
access, and things get even messier. Was "Baldurs Gate 3" really a
2023 game? People were already playing it in 2020!

I sort of miss the days when a game came out on Day X, and we all
moved onto something new when the next game came out three months
later. ;-)