It’s funny you mention not finding a game, my husband and I were talking earlier today about gaming choice overload.
We have a plethora of free, cheap and AAA titles to choose from, like SO many. Too many and most are meh, I’ll get back to that.
I compared it to the 80s and 90s; back then there were thousands of games for the 3 big consoles depending on which era you want to focus on. But, accessibility could be hampered by tech familiarity and/or salaries. It was also common to rent games to try them out. I grew up Nintendo, having watched my Mom and much younger Aunt that stayed with us early on play Mario often. For as long as I can remember, my Mom always had some kind of console in the house and new titles added to our library were relegated to mine and my bros’ birthdays and Christmas gifts. My Dad who had a distaste for gaming even came around the first Christmas Nintendo 64 was out and we got ourselves a fancy new console. Ocarina of Time will always be one of my favorite games lol
The multiplayer games we get now are pushed out too fast. Often have thousands of hands in the making, budgets in the millions, attempts to “manage” expectations through marketing hype, laws, media attention, battlepasses, micro and macro transactions, fan merch galore even before it’s out and then… it’s early access Alpha and stays in Beta forever with “game as a service” model crap, never truly becoming “complete”. With so many bugs, network issues (Palworld wtf is your problem with hosted server rollbacks? cometfon), company acquisitions, rolling departments, project halting, promises and pressure so we get this gestures vaguely.
The “this” is what? No vision? Nothing “new” or “exciting”. Nothing that has broken the mold of the same rehashed, regurgitated bullshit for the past 5 ish years. All of them seem to have some kind of way to dig deep into your pockets and provide lackluster experiences. Which are standing tall, against all odds? Holy hell, LoL, Apex, WoW, Fortnite, really. Two of these games being 15+ years old. They’re no stranger to hackers, some poor Q/A, exploits and sure ya, AAA with large budgets. But they put out new stuff monthly, they TALK to their players, update them, have active moderation or good programmed moderation and learn from their mistakes - for the most part. They’re still greedy and some internal personnel issues that warrant serious criticism.
When greed becomes a forefront though, that’s when we start to lose faith, knowingly or unknowingly. Rather than experiencing the passion of creation through gaming, we see the results of algorithms, manipulation, KPIs, et al from the voracious smiles of the suits in the boardroom.
I believe Conan started off with that passion but especially with its acquisition changed to the “this”. Agreed, if you look at Steam charts exclusively, it does have more players than it did during its lowest points. But the average player count recently is not great. It’s sad.
It is on a downward trend.
Last 6 months:
Past year:
Since AoS launch August 2022:
And all time:
What’s really strange is whatever is happening with this since April:
No other periods of time prior to April have this happening (I made sure to check):
It looks like players only logging on to check their builds and logging off. It’s always really been a thing but not this frequently.
Was curious and bored; bad combo for me. Not finding a game to get in to, still reading the forums so wondered how much these present doldrums have effected affected player count.
