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Emulated games are free, polished, complete
Modern games are $80+ steaming incomplete pile of shit
This mystery will never be solved.
I assume they’re referring to actual hardware. I’d imagine the percentage of gamers playing emulated games is much higher than 14%.
Edit: Found the article
It appears I am correct.
Modern games: requires $300+ game console or a $300+ GPU to get 30 FPS
Retro games: runs on your grandma’s Dell Pavilion still running Windows XP that she refuses to stop using, gets 50/60 depending on region
Almost all of my modern games are indies. Most cost between $5 and $30. I love retro too but if we’re going to only include modern “AAA” titles in the comparison…
I care more about the backups of my ROM collection than I do about my tax returns or resume or other “important” crap.
If I can’t just decide to replay Mario 2 or Simon’s Quest or Chrono Trigger or Symphony of the Night when I’m in my 70s, then what is all this fancy technology we’ve invented really good for?
Does emulation count?
It should! It’s allowed me to play so many games that are hard to find or expensive these days.
The survey question seems to make it seem like it’s referring to original hardware, but I imagine a lot of respondents didn’t limit it that way.
With emulation being common even officially these days (NSO, emulated games on Steam, etc), I think it’s fair to factor that in as well.
I still own my real SNES from circa-1995, but I’d rather play on an emulator than put wear and tear on it, so yes.
Yes, the survey summary below shows no exceptions for physical hardware vs emulation in the question
The percentage should be way, way higher, then, since lots of people use the emulators on Nintendo Switch Online.
It’s May 2024 data from 2022 respondents, biased towards people willing to respond to pretty long consumer surveys. I have similar suspicions you’d see a higher % from a larger sample size or reporting from video game platform and store owners who can differentiate that better than your average consumer.
A lot of people using official channel emulators probably don’t think of it as emulation. I have one of the original style PS3 systems where it had PS2 hardware to play the older games. Does that count as emulation or using an older system? Hard to say where one draws the line.
I’ve been tinkering with Canoe (the emulator the SNES Classsic and NSO both use) for years, so it’s very much emulation to me. Compatibility is so-so, but performance on weak hardware is really good, better than any unofficial SNES emulator. The launch PS3 does not count as emulation for PS2, but every version after does.
Only if you use an emulator released before the year 2000.
“Still” is really not the way to phrase it.
A good chunk of the people playing on retro systems never even owned half the systems back in the day which they have collected now. Or they might be new people getting into the hobby who perhaps weren’t even born when those systems were current.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
It’s such a strange way of looking at a hobby which is more popular now than it ever was.
It’s true and I love the newcomers. But my NES and N64 were both purchased at release and are still one-owner. And used regularly. I also have a 4070ti but I love those old systems.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
An individual cannot but a group of people can.
“Children are still fascinated by sticks” is as true as always, even though the individual children have mostly grown up, grown old, and died.
Of course. And that’s because “still” has two meanings. One being “the same now as always” and the other being “in a continuing state, uninterrupted”
Which one the reader will interpret is dependent on context.
“75% of children still fascinated by sticks” is very likely to mean different groups of children surveyed years apart - the ‘unchanged’ meaning.
“14% of adults over 50 still keep a pair of 80s flared jeans in their wardrobe” is very likely to mean it is the same adults who were wearing them back in the 80s - the ‘uninterrupted’ meaning.
The problem is that for this article, neither of those valid meanings make sense - at least not to me.
It is not ‘uninterrupted’ because we know that lots of people stopped playing old systems, while other people joined the hobby.
It is also not ‘unchanged’, because the levels of people playing 90s consoles will have dipped to a low somewhere in the middle and then bounced back thanks to renewed interest and modern hobbyist technologies that make these things more accessible now than they were just 10 years ago.
It’s altogether a different situation now than it was then, and that’s why I find “still” to be a poor choice of phrase regardless of the meaning intended.
Being able to actually play neo Geo games would make young me so envious Also the full arcade version of games with a button for “insert coin”.
Yeah, the Neo Geo really is that console that was an outrageous luxury back in the day.
There is an arcade near me which is flat fee for entry and every machine is on free-play. It’s very satisfying to be able to keep pressing continue as much as you like.
Given that nowhere in the article does it say that 14% of people exclusively play on pre-2000 hardware I don’t find this that surprising.
I’m more shocked by the last statistic, 11% of American households still use fax. Fax? Fuckin’ why? That’s like saying people still listen to music on Edison cylinders.
Signatures as a form of authorization I think held up the facsimile tech way past it’s best by date
I don’t know about you, but here in Europe you just send everything in digitally now
I live in an area with a large population of Amish, they fax everything.
I give my fax number to anything that asks me for a phone number. It’s a valid number that can’t recieve calls, meaning when my number is inevitably leaked/purchased by telemarketers, scammers, etc. I don’t even notice.
Fax is commonly used at least in the US because it has regulatory recognition as a secure means of transferring information, it’s highly interoperable, and it doesn’t really have a successor that has caused the network effect to die out entirely.
11% seems slightly higher than I’d expect, but not crazy. Contracts, medical records, interactions with the government are all good reasons to need to send or receive one occasionally. That about 1 in 10 households did last year? Makes some sense.
Seems crazy to me. I can’t imagine that 1 in 10 household even have fax machines. All the stuff you mention is business and medical stuff. Nobody faxes in their medical requests from home.
Except for maybe people who have terrible health problems or those who care for them
Nah. They might do it from work or maybe by email gateway.
Hell it’s only even possible for the 27% of homes that still have a landline. There’s just no way.
There are a lot of people with old technology in their home that still gets used. Fax is still needed for lots of medical things, and not everyone has an office to go to.
Think retired people taking care of sick family members.
Nah. It’s got a big fat [citation needed] from me.
10% of people? Sure I’d believe that 10 % of people have transferred data using fax technology at least once in the past year or something. But 10% of households, and you can’t count email to-fax gateways?
No way.
The citation is in the article which is from a Consumer Reports study. In case you don’t know, they’re very trustworthy.
I’m not attempting to convince you that the figure is accurate because I don’t need to that. I’m attempting to get you to understand that a big portion of the population of the USA are just making do with what they have.
According to American Dad! widespread continued use would have gotten us the blorfer.
And some people play poker, or even chess. What can you do, people like old stuff.
Red Alert 2 on a 4090
Famicom owner checking in.
I do. I don’t want or need top notch graphics. My ps5 collects dust.
Gameplay is always king.
Graphics can contribute a lot - some games are fucking gorgeous, and I’ll stop and appreciate good scenery in digital environment the same as IRL.
But jaw-droppingly incredible graphics can never compensate for bad or even mediocre gameplay.
And shit graphics will never kill a game with good gameplay. Done right, shit graphics can even be charming in a nostalgic kind of way.
SNES, Genesis and TG16 do have top notch graphics for those who can’t do without them.
GBC almost exclusively these days, I just can’t devote the time to things like Morrowind anymore as much as I want to. I do want to hack my OG Xbox and run Voodoo Vince, Psychonauts, and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy again, but then that only brings me up to like 2003.
Without piracy and the industry wanting to move digital only we are doomed.
Keyword: “without”.
I wonder how many people “still” drive cars “released” before 2000?
Game consoles are solid-state and tend to not wear out like cars.
That said, my car is from 2003.
I hate this >:( Let me exaplain myself. What I hate is that way that people see videogames, like, if you play something old you are stuck in the past, but hey! If you read a book that is 100yo or watch a movie that is 40yo it is okay! but if you play in atari, what are you? a caveman?
That stigma seems to be getting slightly better, but it’s always bothered me.
“OMG you’ve been playing that game for hours! Why don’t you go DO something! You’re rotting your brain!!” -Someone who’s about to sit in front of the TV until they fall asleep.
I just openly laughed right at them when I was told that, especially because my dad was no longer able to keep up with my math homework by the seventh grade.
These days I’m out on my own, with a house and a fiancée, still play video games as a primary hobby, and he’s a Trump voter in a shitty apartment that doesn’t talk about anything except crying about all the n[REDACTED]s and transes. One of us sure rotted his brain and I’m pretty confident saying it probably wasn’t me.
For a second I thought “he” was your fiancée. The trump voter. I was like “why would you marry a… Oh, he means his dad.”
What I hate is that way that people see videogames, like, if you play something old you are stuck in the past
I must not operate in those circles. I’ve never heard that before, but I’m also old and playing old games and fewer newer ones.
I’m kind of mixed on that depending on the game. In general I say I’d rather the kids play a game than watch a show because it’s interactive rather than just pushing mush into their face.
The other side though is how so many games (most notoriously mobile ones) are so keyed into scratching those little itches to keep someone playing for way longer than should be healthy.
I really miss the early mobile games days, when they were still experimenting with the format and you had games like Angry Birds, Infinity Blade, Peggle, and various Marble Madness or Monkey Ball clones, just for starters.
People were making games designed to be fun, and if they were addictive, it was because you were enjoying yourself. If you bought the game they didn’t care how addicted you got or not, only that you didn’t tell all your friends it sucked! Lol
Once it started taking notes from the casino industry, that was it. I don’t even open the Play Store anymore.
Just now had a thought: If places like Newgrounds or ArmorGames were pay to play for developers like the mainline mobile stores are, I bet we would have seen a lot more of that nonsense a lot sooner. (kongregate seems to serve a perfect example of this.)
I’ve been playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors on original hardware today haha. On my old Apple color monitor.
I mostly game on old systems or my steam deck.
Oh man such a great game. Great couch co-op.
Yeah I tormented my poor daughter with it when she was younger. I did not have the patience to get her through it lol.
Now that she’s older we do great.
I don’t think I ever made it past the werewolf castle level without cheats.
Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it’s not fun. How old are the board and card games again?
Hell, chess is huge right now, and it’s over 1500 years old.
Don’t forget Backgammon. World’s oldest board game!
Is it older than the Royal Game of Ur?
