Games that won't die (DotA, Apex, Rust, Siege etc.)

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

It dawned on me the other day that my Steam library more or less looks the same as 8 years ago. Very few new games actually stick around for more than a few months. If you look at Steam graph websites, it's more or less the same games in the top 25 as well. Yet they're games you rarely hear much about other than Youtube feeding you "APEX DEAD???" essays. DotA, Siege, War Thunder, Delta Force, Payday 2 somehow. MH: World?

Are you still playing any of these games? What would it take for a new game to enter this tier of longevity rather than fall on its ass like Lethal Company, Helldivers 2, REPO etc? My theory is that people rather return to games they were once passionate about than to waste money gambling on the newest 'magical teen kills white people' game, meaning it's practically too late for any newer game to become a genre classic.

Then you got shit like PUBG, NARAKA or Don't Starve that thrive solely from third-world internet cafe activity.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

It dawned on me the other day that my Steam library more or less looks the same as 8 years ago. Very few new games actually stick around for more than a few months. If you look at Steam graph websites, it's more or less the same games in the top 25 as well. Yet they're games you rarely hear much about other than Youtube feeding you "APEX DEAD???" essays. DotA, Siege, War Thunder, Delta Force, Payday 2 somehow. MH: World?

Are you still playing any of these games? What would it take for a new game to enter this tier of longevity rather than fall on its ass like Lethal Company, Helldivers 2, REPO etc? My theory is that people rather return to games they were once passionate about than to waste money gambling on the newest 'magical teen kills white people' game, meaning it's practically too late for any newer game to become a genre classic.

Then you got shit like PUBG, NARAKA or Don't Starve that thrive solely from third-world internet cafe activity.

Answer: it's fun

edit/clarification: Other people find them fun

 

[Fishcat]

Payday 2 somehow

I'm guessing it has something to do with how the game goes on deep sales. I didn't know anything about the game and generally don't play games like that but a friend (who also wasn't really invested) suggested that we try it since you could pick it up for a dollar.

Generating an extremely spergy community helps, War Thunder is notorious for it. Tbh I don't think any of the games you listed are all that long-lasting in the sense of drawing in many new players as time goes on, more that they attached perfectly to the autism receptors for a core group who can't let it go. Usually when I talk to random people in real life, the most popular picks from those who claim to enjoy games are Minecraft and generic modern continuously updated shooters backed by cult of personality streamers (Fortnite, Apex, Valorant, etc.). Minecraft is Minecraft, and the latter seems to higher turnover where the average player isn't as dedicated but new players show up all the time as updates are added.

 

[Luigi Mangione]

Team Fortress 2 has been kicking for nearly 20 years now. The main issue is that there's been no prevalent successor to it; Paladins didn't get popular enough, and Overwatch had zero community server support and pushed a bunch of corporate, woke slop to the forefront of its identity. Even Valve couldn't get lightning to strike twice with Dead(game)lock, the characters are boring as shit and most FPS players will prefer TF2 and most MOBA players will prefer DOTA, so it's in this weird grey-area.

I think what made TF2 fun is the freedom aspect, you're not locked into exclusively 5v5 or 6v6 matches, you can just fuck around in a 16v16 server (some are even bigger nowadays), whereas FPS games are way too obsessed with establishing a competitive scene nowadays, and everything feels samey. TF2 has way more options in how to play the game despite from a gameplay perspective being limited to only 9 classes which are rather barebones.

 

[Dead Lion]

Part of it is sunken cost fallacy. Many people spend hundreds if not thousands of hours in those games and know them like the back of their hand. Many of them also come with extensive monetization so players are invested not only monetarily.

So any game that comes out has to compete with massive games that have year's worth of content, an active community and whatnot. Every co-op shooter has to compete with Payday 2 for instance. It has ten years of content and an active modding scene. There's no way in hell a new Co-Op game can release with as many maps and weapons. Payday 3 was a massive flop despite a promising start. Crime Boss failed because of bad marketing and den of wolves will flop as well. Same thing with DOTA and LOL, Deadlock is fucking dead because you cant force people to move from the game where they put down roots. So all new games just compete for a small vapour of homeless consumers and end up with a couple thousand daily players.

 

[Luigi Mangione]

Part of it is sunken cost fallacy. Many people spend hundreds if not thousands of hours in those games and know them like the back of their hand. Many of them also come with extensive monetization so players are invested not only monetarily.

So any game that comes out has to compete with massive games that have year's worth of content, an active community and whatnot. Every co-op shooter has to compete with Payday 2 for instance. It has ten years of content and an active modding scene. There's no way in hell a new Co-Op game can release with as many maps and weapons. Payday 3 was a massive flop despite a promising start. Crime Boss failed because of bad marketing and den of wolves will flop as well. Same thing with DOTA and LOL, Deadlock is fucking dead because you cant force people to move from the game where they put down roots. So all new games just compete for a small vapour of homeless consumers and end up with a couple thousand daily players.

The generation who grew up with LOL and DOTA for example are now the ones working 9-5 jobs, so they don't have the youthful energy they once did to learn a new game that they don't even know is going to be well-received and popular for long, so why bother if you still have the games you are confident on? Fortnite got successful because it managed to capture the late zoomer/Gen Alpha mindset that's still in its formative years. COD and sports games still sell OK because it's pretty simple comfort food. Even WADs for Doom 2 are still popular because it's a game you can pretty much just pick-up and play without being overwhelmed by various new mechanics.

It's the same with all other kinds of media, movies, TV and music, and why there's so much banking on nostalgia to make something successful now. Most people don't want to be the person scouring through tons of content they're incapable of enjoying on the same level as what they hold dear in their formative years, because they simply don't have the mental bandwidth available to curate through what might be mediocre, uninteresting slop when they have stuff they're familiar with still present and available, whilst expending their energies in the work force. And this is how you get cultural stagnation and eventually rot.

 

[Sangue e terra]

Part of it is sunken cost fallacy.

I thought this too, until I acquired some "new" games. By that, I mean I branched out to play some games that I haven't played yet that might be a decade old. Like an older Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 2 or something. Newer games are too demanding on the GPU for an actual smooth experience.

• Older games will hit 200 fps with no isssues, no new PC +$500 investments for a semi-brainrot activity.
• Cheap as fuck on steam so you can gift it to your frens for coop.
• LAN support or easy private server set up, incase of the multiplayer was removed.
• Less pozzed shit (niggers, women and trannys).
• Easier mechanics, not a whole fucking lore book and a 20h grind time to get going (looking at extraction shooters), games should not be a full time job. - [competetive games are excluded here]
• No microtransaction clutter.

Newer games got NONE of these points, so the game library might look old, but it's just people adding new games that they haven't played yet. That's why most game library looks so stagnated, everyone is just stuck with pre 2020 games at this point, and the only way to get "new" stuff is to go further back to even 2000. I mean, why would I play a remaster of a game when the old one still looks comfy and runs better.

The best stuff has already been made. I think in a very far future we might start to see good stuff again. Until then, I will stick with minecraft and CS2.

 

[NaggotFigger]

I always love DOOM in particular. There's always something particularly charming in the early 2 DOOM titles that keeps people ongoing with their passion for DOOM Wads and so on. But holy fucking shit, trannies will ruin almost every aged like wine games and plague them with unbridled gay autism that gave them a bad taste. I'd always play DOOM 1, 2, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein in a heartbeat, even if I stopped playing video games as a whole.

 

[Sissy]

Team Fortress 2 has been kicking for nearly 20 years now. The main issue is that there's been no prevalent successor to it; Paladins didn't get popular enough, and Overwatch had zero community server support and pushed a bunch of corporate, woke slop to the forefront of its identity. Even Valve couldn't get lightning to strike twice with Dead(game)lock, the characters are boring as shit and most FPS players will prefer TF2 and most MOBA players will prefer DOTA, so it's in this weird grey-area.

I think what made TF2 fun is the freedom aspect, you're not locked into exclusively 5v5 or 6v6 matches, you can just fuck around in a 16v16 server (some are even bigger nowadays), whereas FPS games are way too obsessed with establishing a competitive scene nowadays, and everything feels samey. TF2 has way more options in how to play the game despite from a gameplay perspective being limited to only 9 classes which are rather barebones.

TF2 is the best multiplayer shooter to come out sense Quake 3, and thats why it will NEVER die!

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The more optimistic point of view is that games with a large player base have an inherent advantage and they need to really fuck things hard to have people move to the competition.

The less optimistic view is that modern gaming is shit.

 

[El Goblina]

I always love DOOM in particular.

This is my take on Quake and Quake 2. I loved the dinky little blaster you get infinite ammo for in Q2. I spent a lot of time sniping with that, and I found it a lot of fun. Quake was always so high-strung and action loaded that it made the puzzle stuff in Half-Life uninteresting. Q3 is the one that gets remembered most because it was tuned for competition, but Q1's unevenness is exactly why it endures for me.

 

[Dead Lion]

I thought this too, until I acquired some "new" games. By that, I mean I branched out to play some games that I haven't played yet that might be a decade old. Like an older Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 2 or something. Newer games are too demanding on the GPU for an actual smooth experience.

• Older games will hit 200 fps with no isssues, no new PC +$500 investments for a semi-brainrot activity.
• Cheap as fuck on steam so you can gift it to your frens for coop.
• LAN support or easy private server set up, incase of the multiplayer was removed.
• Less pozzed shit (niggers, women and trannys).
• Easier mechanics, not a whole fucking lore book and a 20h grind time to get going (looking at extraction shooters), games should not be a full time job. - [competetive games are excluded here]
• No microtransaction clutter.

Newer games got NONE of these points, so the game library might look old, but it's just people adding new games that they haven't played yet. That's why most game library looks so stagnated, everyone is just stuck with pre 2020 games at this point, and the only way to get "new" stuff is to go further back to even 2000. I mean, why would I play a remaster of a game when the old one still looks comfy and runs better.

The best stuff has already been made. I think in a very far future we might start to see good stuff again. Until then, I will stick with minecraft and CS2.

Thing is you're talking about single player games. They behave a bit differently than multiplayer games. Unless they're incredibly autistic or have active modding scene most people play them once and drop 'em, often not even finishing it. On steam charts a successful single player game will have a massive spike on day one, and then a gradual decline as people finish the game. Then a small spike on sales. Multiplayer games will maintain a larger player base with big spike on updates. They used to behave just like single player games before live service became a thing. Maybe you would get a map pack and some character models.

Also to the 'too demanding on GPU's' point, that's because you're running on modern hardware that's way more powerful than those early 7th gen games were made for. Although i do agree that game devs got lazy and don't optimize like they should be. I'm still waiting for a game that looks better than battlefield 1. Games these days also don't do art direction like those older games, and if they do it's murdered by endless colaboations and we get to the point where Messi, Nicki Minaj, an Ultramarine and Groot are fighting zombies in a Vietnamese firebase or some shit. That's why older games sometimes look better.

The generation who grew up with LOL and DOTA for example are now the ones working 9-5 jobs, so they don't have the youthful energy they once did to learn a new game that they don't even know is going to be well-received and popular for long, so why bother if you still have the games you are confident on? Fortnite got successful because it managed to capture the late zoomer/Gen Alpha mindset that's still in its formative years. COD and sports games still sell OK because it's pretty simple comfort food. Even WADs for Doom 2 are still popular because it's a game you can pretty much just pick-up and play without being overwhelmed by various new mechanics.

I'm a zoomie and trust me zoom zoomz are very into Legue of Legends and Counter Strike. I used to get bullied at school for not playing CS:GO, good times.

 

[DumbDude43]

when a game is fun and doesn't get stale over time, there's no real reason to stop playing it.
people still play poker today despite it being over a hundred years old. there have been hundreds of new card games that came and went, but poker sticks around because it's just that good.
likewise, at this moment counter strike is the most played game on steam despite it being 25 years old - older than steam itself. and it's not just a bunch of 40 year old boomers playing it, there's a significant amount of young players who weren't even born when the first cs got released back in 2000. the core game is simply that good.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Some of you guys are really down on this, but I could see it as an overall positive - video games have matured to the point where graphics, sound, mechanics, control schemes, and so forth have reached good-enough status and millions of players (including young ones) are no longer vulnerable to the industry's "consume product and get excited for next product" cycle.

 

[Juan Números]

Blizzard is keeping Heroes of the Storm alive through pure spite or sunken cost fallacy, since they invested an ungodly amount of money in both development and trying to finance a competitive scene that never took off.

Alive may be an overstatement, since they only keep the light on the servers. I like it and still play it from time to time with friends.


Another game I'm surprised to see it's still alive is Secret World Legends. I've played quite some time on the first iteration (The Secret World), but this "new" (roughly the same content and engine) iteration didn't win me over. A shame since I liked this world a lot.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

when a game is fun and doesn't get stale over time, there's no real reason to stop playing it.
people still play poker today despite it being over a hundred years old. there have been hundreds of new card games that came and went, but poker sticks around because it's just that good.
likewise, at this moment counter strike is the most played game on steam despite it being 25 years old - older than steam itself. and it's not just a bunch of 40 year old boomers playing it, there's a significant amount of young players who weren't even born when the first cs got released back in 2000. the core game is simply that good.

Thing is though, you'll hear someone say "God I hate Siege" and then have 5k hours in it. How often does that happen to new games? "Palworld is sloppy korean chink shot but I'm 1800 hours in". Sure you can write it off as sunk cost fallacy but I think it's something more deeply rooted in change being unappealing, but why does it happen specifically to these games that made it big almost a decade ago?

For Honor is going on like Year 9 and it's still getting content and ubisoft collabs, but it's also relatively niche and doesn't hit the numbers like other games do. Yet it lives. It probably has to do with people using the same hardware for 8 years, playing the same games they did 8 years ago, and seeing the new RTX card graphs using 4x fake frame gen as a measurement underlines the depressing development.

I remember 4x AA being a simple option you picked and it was for high-end cards. Now you got up/downscaling, AI anti-aliasing, smurry shit sharpened up to counter act it, the same way you need nvidia Reflex to counteract the smudgy movement of fake frames. You take a pill and then 3 other pills to combat the side effects of the first pill.

TF2? Max fps config, go. Same as 10 years ago.

 

[Masturbator]

to point at The Obvious everything roughly truncates to the fact that these games are simply entertaining to play and are not taxing emotionally nor forcing you to share the game with literal subhumans by giving you the option to dip everytime

myself i still play apex since release purely because it scratches my tactical itch while supplying me with normal randoms each game as well its kind of a game i never found myself at odds short of other players actually using their brains against me and its probably only one competitive game that doesnt makes me wanna ragequit

 

[WULULULULU]

Older games will hit 200 fps with no isssues, no new PC +$500 investments for a semi-brainrot activity.

This is honestly hilarious when you consider newer F2P games to old ones. World of Tanks, War Thunder, TF2 (even with some unoptimized settings), CSGO, DOTA2, etc. can and will run with high FPS even with most settings cranked to the max, and with an optional HD pack that is free to download and use. This also adds to the fact that their game engines are easier to look and recognize even from an artstyle perspective. Compared that to F2P games post 2020: Genshin Impact, Once Human, Lost Ark, The First Descendant, Wuthering Waves, Marvel Rivals, VALORANT, etc., they require a good GPU to even reach 60-120 fps, and even then, reaching to those fps numbers consistently for a smooth experience is nearly fucking impossible because of whatever shit they use on their game engines, on top of a rising storage requirement that can go up to 100GB in mere months of updates. Their artstyles are also atrocious, its like someone made threw the entire RGB color chart and saw which shit stuck instead of making simple color schemes.

 

[COME ON OUT YOU RAPIST]

Even Valve couldn't get lightning to strike twice with Dead(game)lock, the characters are boring as shit and most FPS players will prefer TF2 and most MOBA players will prefer DOTA, so it's in this weird grey-area.

I've played both and think TF2 is ultimately better, but Deadlock has enter a private alpha for the formerly-private alpha and is receiving major changes. If it launches it probably won't be as a boring thirty minute grindfest with Dota elements.

 

[ShahOfIran1979]

GTA San Andreas is still very popular 20 years later. Especially among Hispanics and Russians.