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points by jjcm 1 day ago | 0 comments

It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.

I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.

[–] sevenzero 1 day ago

The quality of games became so bad that I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis, scrolling through the catalog without finding anything I want to play...

I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.

Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...

[–] georgeecollins 1 day ago

Maybe you would like Hardspace Shipbreaker? That's a good game with unusual mechanics. Or maybe Factorio if you enjoy Terraria. Maybe Ark Raiders or Valheim if you like action multiplayer games?

I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.

[–] sevenzero 1 day ago

I do enjoy Valheim and Cracktorio. Ark Raiders looks cool, but I hate PvP experiences as I suck at shooters and prefer to avoid online dick measuring contests. Also wouldn't get my friends to play it with me. Gotta check out the Shipbreaker thingy

[–] katbyte 1 day ago

Apparently arc silos players based on aggression so if you don’t engage in pvp it puts you with other players who don’t and if you do with those who do

https://arcraiders.com/news/notes-on-the-matchmaking-system

Some people really like it, some do not (I don’t play just have some friends who enjoy it)

[–] red-iron-pine 18 hours ago

lotta reviews of shipbreaker, including lets-plays where it's just a guy streaming slow country music while welding apart starship parts.

easy to find one -- you'll know if it's your jam and worth buying after a few minutes

[–] Tade0 1 day ago

> Cracktorio

I still can't determine if it was the long COVID or staying up until 5am playing this fucking thing that made my coworker act so erratically for months on end.

I woved not to touch that as I prefer to remain employed.

[–] torben-friis 1 day ago

>Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore.

Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!

It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.

[–] sevenzero 1 day ago

See, ballxpit was a perfect example for me, for uninnovative gameplay, as you just shoot balls and the game mostly plays itself for you. I can see why people like it, I guess its just not for me.

I know the other ones, but they really do not appeal to me, except for maybe balatro.

[–] torben-friis 1 day ago

>for uninnovative gameplay, as you just shoot balls and the game mostly plays itself for you

I'd disagree. The shooting itself is as old as space invaders, but there is a neat mechanic there worth exploring regarding the combinations of powerups and 'character powers' IMO. You have to choose what to fuse/powerup to keep the damage scaling well enough (though the amount of combinations isn't large enough to last more than a couple weekends, I'll give you that).

[–] bluGill 1 day ago

The average quality of games has always been bad. You probably aren't old enough to remember all the bad games on the Atari 2600.

[–] swatcoder 1 day ago

There's truth to what you're saying, but for some perspective: catalogers identify about 400 games published for the 2600 over its entire lifespan; Steam has about that many new releases every week.

That difference in volume, which improvements in AI workflow will keep accelerating, really does point towards personal curation being far more overwhelming than it had been.

With the 2600, you and your friends would probably have a ready working memory of pretty much most of the good stuff, most of the awful stuff, and some insight into the publishers and presentation/packaging cues that point one way or another for an unfamiliar title.

With Steam, if you want to be able to find very personal idiosyncratic gems, instead of just following social media buzz or AAA PR -- one of the most exciting benefits to today's massive catalog -- you have to wade through an increasingly unfathomable amount of slop.

[–] gpderetta 1 day ago

90% of everything is crap; also Sturgeon might have been an hopeless optimist.

[–] red-iron-pine 18 hours ago

i am old enough to remember the atari games and their crap. i played the "legendary" E.T. game on atari and could never figure it out.

there has always been a lot of shit, but most of it was at the margins, and you could easily find the real flagship games.

now the slop is never ending and competes on the front page against real titles

[–] legitster 1 day ago

This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)

Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?

[–] norman784 1 day ago

> The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming

I think that's the problem, there are too many to choose from, where you end up overwhelmed and ends up choosing none.

[–] izacus 1 day ago

No, I think the problem is that the person writing that:

- Has grown up and doesn't actually want to play games anymore (without realizing it)

- Is severely depressed and needs other help than the one games can provide.

[–] nater5000 1 day ago

>I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis

I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that you're an outlier lol

[–] Telaneo 1 day ago

I've never used the Steam for browsing for games to buy. I've only bought stuff there after finding the games some place else (reviews, word-of-mouth). Using it for that has been a terrible experience since the day they opened the floodgates, since there's just too many damn games out there, even ignoring the slop (even without AI, there's still the Unity asset flip to flood the store).

Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.

I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.

[–] snapcaster 1 day ago

yeah i have same experience but not sure if its just me getting older. the youngest game i play regularly is still 5 years old

[–] sevenzero 1 day ago

Might be age and depression for me to be fair. Don't want to talk down on game devs either, a lot of games look good, but ain't for me.

[–] georgemcbay 1 day ago

> not sure if its just me getting older

I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.

Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.

Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.