this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don't have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of "how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?"
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it's a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money
and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it'd still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I've played, because I've spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you'd think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just...doesn't matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Free means a hell of a lot when you are a child with approximately $0 in expendable income.
Free means you can easily get any friends to dip in and play which is a big factor.
Hmm. That's a thought. I guess that that'd mesh with them also all being multiplayer.
Also big up for Cataclysm: DDA. One of the greatest games ever made.
It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it's very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.
That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!
I still haven't beaten The Wizard of Yendor, don't even talk to me about Dwarf Fortress hahah
NetHack takes me waaaay back. Blows my mind DevTeam are still working on it. I haven’t played in a few years. NetHack, Angband, C:DDA, etc are all games I play on long haul flights since they use the least battery and I’ve not been on a long haul since the pandemic.
Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.
NetHack and Angband don't do that.
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I'd say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is...kinda nuts. It's not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is "go check the code"...
There are also some military sims I've played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren't, they're probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don't bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.
In case you weren't aware (it sounds like you're not) :
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cataclysm
This isn't going to teach you how to play but it's an excellent reference wiki
Soo.. What I'm getting is that you kinda like a game called Catapult: Streets Ahead?
Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It's rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that's 9 cents an hour, and I'm still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!
I'm old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.
But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.
3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I don't get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
The game may be old but that doesn't mean a particular person has played it before.
People don't get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you've pretty much got it figured out.
I'm playing Counter-Strike 2
... exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod
... that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago
I read every one of those and thought. Well that's a new game. Apparently I'm old.
League of legends is two decades old now, so if you're thinking it's new, yeah that's on you 😜
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/
Nothing like a comment about someone's grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you've played in its original form.