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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

On the hand, most people stop playing most games pretty quickly after purchase, too. And the good ones often get remade.

So, while this will disappoint some people, I think "destroys the reputation" is a bit much. Many game buyers don't care that much.

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Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago. TF2 was made in 2007 and is still in the top 10. There’s also a huge number of gamers who played older games. In my friends list I’d say roughly half at any given time are imaging non-AA games that are at least 5 years old, and more than half at least regularly play older games.

Going back and playing favourites is an absolutely integral part of gaming as a hobby.

I game on both Mac and PC and I absolutely would abandon gaming on Mac if it stopped supporting older games. Why would I invest in games on Mac if I can’t be sure I can play it later, when I KNOW it’ll work “forever” on PC?

In fact, the move towards internet-based multiplayer action has significantly extended game longevity. In the pre-Internet world, very few games ever achieved the sort of long-running activity you now get almost routinely with any moderately-successful production.

Those games with active revenue streams and playerbases will probably get OS updates.

Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

It says more about how some publishers have moved from releasing new games to incremental updates as part of a subscription model than it does about people playing "old" games.

> Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

The original Halflife just got a number of security, AI, and other bugfixes.

Does that mean it no longer counts as a game made in 1998?

For the purposes of a discussion about older games not being playable on modern OSes? Yeah, maybe. In fact it could have no code changes whatsoever, but just be recompiled against newer tooling to accomplish that goal.

But I'm talking about games that are getting extensive updates through their lifecycle. It's quite possible that some of these "same" games will be playable in 50 years via slow process of incremental updates. There's no reason to suspect those are any less supporting of modern hardware & OSs than newly released games.

There's already been some unconfirmed talk of GTAV being the last ever GTA, with a hypothetical major update just being a new paid-for area that'll appear in-game one day, as opposed to being a new shrink-wrapped game under a different title like you'd get in the 90s.

> Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago.

Being "old" is not a problem. Being unmaintained is. I bet that every game in Steam's top-100 list is still being maintained.

And 64-bit support has been available in Macs since 2007. Only games older than 12 years missed the opportunity to use modern tech.

Counter Strike Source looks like will not be updated by Valve. I play it every other day. Is there a petition I can sign?

This is kind of pedantic, but I feel like you should specify video games here. Perhaps the consumer home platform personal computer video game market, even.

People have been playing cards, mahjong, chess, and catch greater than a century, so it's not some inherent ephemerality of games that's the problem here.

And even amongst the retro video game market, people are still playing console and arcade games that are decades old.

There's certainly a trend here, but I don't think it's something we should blame on the players.

I imagine quite a few games never get played once bought.

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