Steam has a web-page listing the best-selling games of 2023, grouped
into various tiers (games within each tier aren't ranked, however). https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2023
Top of the pack ("Platinum Tier") is Cyberpunk 2077, Sons of the
Forest, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, Baldurs Gate 3, PUBG, Destiny 2,
Lost Ark, and Counter Strike 2.
Games like Elden Ring, GTA5, Dead by Daylight and Arnored Core 6 help
fill out the "Golden Tier".
Sadly, System Shock doesn't even make it into "Bronze".
There's also a 'most played' counter reporting which games had the
highest 'peak players', if that matters to you (unsurprisingly, it
pretty much mirrors the best selling list, at least at start).
A lot of the games are MMOS or Multiplayer battlers, yeah I know they're popular, but I don't want to play either, and think they're a scourge on actually fun gaming.
On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 10:55:18 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
On 30/12/2023 18:49, Justisaur wrote:
A lot of the games are MMOS or Multiplayer battlers, yeah I know they're >>> popular, but I don't want to play either, and think they're a scourge on >>> actually fun gaming.
Many years ago I used to joke about how long it would be before it
changed from games with a financial model attached to a financial model
with games attached. I no longer think it's a joke. Even worse is the
way that they play on people's flaws to get them to spend money instead
of just the old fashion idea of give us some money and we'll give you
something you enjoy.
<ramblin'>
While I get where you are coming from, I don't totally agree, but only
in the idea that this is somehow new. The video games industry (or at
least part of it) has always had a business-first orientation where
artistry and quality played second fiddle to 'will this make us oodles
of money with the absolute minimum outlay". It resulted in huge
swathes of absolutely terrible games that people paid good money for
and were incredibly disappointed when the game was a lazy port or
clone, or performed poorly, or didn't even run at all. These games
have - with a handful of exceptions - been forgotten, but there was a
glut of them.
Modern games use different tactics to make money but the core ideal
for too many games remains the same: make the cheapest game possible
and then market the hell out of it to rake in a lot of cash before
people wise up.
In earlier decades, it was easier to get away with this, not so much
because gamers were less sophisticated (although, to a degree, I think
they were, at least with regards to how corporations try to manipulate
them) but because information - about the product, about the business practices, etc. - were harder to come by. It's not just the network
effect - where gamers talk to one another - but simply being able to
compare one game to the next. When you're limited to only what
magazines tell you, and only what the box-copy says, you're ability to discriminate is limited. All the more when that information is so
ephemeral; often, you couldn't go back and compare what Game X against
Game Y because Game X was no longer on the store shelves. With
decades-old games still available on Steam, that comparison is much
easier.
Which means publishers have to be more sophisticated in their schemes.
Some of them, of course, are not (and it's not just limited to small publishers; asset flip games are the epitomy of this problem). But
'give it away free and make up for it in post-sale services' is a
scheme that has a long history outside of gaming, and for good reason:
it works. It's no surprise it works against gamers too.
Fortunately, there are some developers who still care about gaming
enough to go 'old school' and try to develop a good product that will
sell on its own merits (see, "Baldurs Gate 3"). But the from the
beginning, the industry was rife with companies whose aim was make-money-first, customer satisfaction whenever
For me the pinnacle of that is lootboxes (which aren't gambling but
instead surprise mechanics) as even though study after study has shown
the correlation between them and problem gambling companies still put
them in games knowing this.
One of the crappy things I saw was in World of Tanks after Belgium
classed lootboxes as gambling. They choose the easy route of just saying
you can't buy them if you lived in Belgium but you then had one of their
own community managers posting on the offical forum telling you how to
easily get around the restrictions they'd put in place - stay classy!
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