Topic: Consumers were mostly playing older games in 2023, report suggests

@Rambler At first I thought you misspelt Death From Above 1979. lol

Just gave them a listen, yeah you're right they are quality! They seem to be still active too.

@jump I saw DFA 1979 once - they were like a nice version of Lightning Bolt

I think the current version of Death consists of the sons of the bass player? The original band were brothers, so it's not quite a Napalm Death / Sugababes scenario...

@jump
Yes, but that wasn't quite my point. My point was more that because we're now in a "post radio" age the music mono-culture is dead. When there was a huge hit in decades past everyone would hear it. It'd be unavoidable. That's not true anymore

And as a result there aren't anywhere near as many breakout artists anymore. People are going on about Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran etc but these are not new artists. They've been in the charts for well over a decade. I mean sure, there are viral hits and one hit wonders but most of the artists people congregate around gained their mass audience in the pre-spotify era. Newer artists can and do find an audience, finding an audience is easier than ever, but the audiences are heavily fractured and will never be as big as they once were

And to bring it back to the topic, this most definitely isn't the force happening to gaming. If anything gaming is going through the opposite. Gaming is being driven more and more by the gatekeepers. The biggest games are increasingly the ones that have the biggest marketing budgets. And it's dudes in suits who decide what those games are

I'd personally argue that's true for the actual biggest games but that more games trying to use marketing to get to even close to that level of success are notably failing at doing that, while random other games most didn't expect to be huge are the actual successes.

In my case, I play old games because I can't afford new ones.

It's almost as if capitalism and rampant inequality actually does have negative consequences.

Why did music streaming start? Because of piracy and the music industry wanting to make more money.

Why did piracy start? Because the music industry was built on a practice of packaging 2 or 3 half-decent songs on an album otherwise full of dross. Why did the industry do that? To make more money.

The average music consumer didn't feel they were getting value for their hard-earned money, so turned to Napster et al to just download the decent songs they wanted and ignore the dross they didn't want.

The cinema industry is struggling because it wanted to make more money and pushed customers too far. Cineworld ticket prices before Covid were usually around £12 for one adult ticket. Covid happened, people had to do without cinema for a bit, and now ticket prices are down to £6 because everyone was fed up of getting ripped off at the cinema, stopped going and stream at home instead.

Average people very simply won't/can't go on paying more and more for increasingly derivative content when they're not seeing a proportionate increase in income. It gets kinda impossible at some point.

Wages have stagnated for years, yet corporations must have more of our money so must push prices up.

Sony and Microsoft have spent years over-investing in the games industry, buying up exclusivity in one form or another, while most likely selling hardware at a loss. The average consumer cannot support it. We need affordable innovation (and a pay rise). What do Sony do? Fork out x hundred million dollars on another Spider-Man game. What do Microsoft do? Fork out x billion dollars for more Call of Duty. How do they expect us to pay them enough to make that worthwhile? We are stretched, bro!