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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Every time I look at this I'm absolutely baffled by the quality of little games, although many being clones.

I just wasted 30' in 1 click. Something I can't say about my steam library. I think it has to do with the instant-ON aspect of the games. <click> -> start, immersed. As opposed to many screens, "oh that needs an update"...

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I've heard TikTok described similarly compared with YouTube. Makes me wonder if there's room for a "TikTok for games"

You mean HypeHype? https://hypehype.com/

(I'm not affiliated)

This website shows me basically nothing.

They had an early access iirc which I joined.

https://castle.xyz/ is sorta that concept, but could also be described as "hypercard meets instagram"

>I've heard TikTok described similarly compared with YouTube. Makes me wonder if there's room for a "TikTok for games"

IMO it's the remixing that makes TikTok work. The equivalent would be every game is open sourced and remixable in easy ways. Like the way you can take one TikTok's video audio and recontextualize the meaning with your own video. Or an audio track can become the format that everyone follows by using the audio.

Pico8 has remixing too. You can view the code for any cart, and then download it, change the code/art/sounds a bit, and reupload it. There’s a super active Celeste Classic modding scene in pico8 for this reason.

I absolutely think there's room for it, but I have doubts about how feasible it is. With tools like bitsy its possible to create an interesting game really fast, but nowhere near as fast as a tiktok video, and the "time to variety of things you can do" ratio for video is far better than it is for software.

Maybe it is possible though, would love to see the day if so

Dreams on the PS4 is a little like this. Every game loads instantly, and every asset is remixable into other games and offshoots.

It was called newgrounds.

>I think it has to do with the instant-ON aspect of the games. <click> -> start, immersed. As opposed to many screens, "oh that needs an update"...

I found exactly the same thing. I really got into the Sega Mega Drive over the past year and a bit, despite having a PS4 and modern PC. It's not because the games from 30 years ago are necessarily better, but when you only play games for 2-3 hours every few weeks, a 50GB install followed by a 20GB patch really kills the experience.

If you're purchasing a game right before playing it, a 50GB install and a 20GB patch is probably easier than getting your hands on a mega drive game.

If you're buying the game ahead of time or already own it, then shouldn't auto-updates take care of things so you can jump right in?

Only if you leave the device turned on soon the time and steam running, too.

>If you're purchasing a game right before playing it, a 50GB install and a 20GB patch is probably easier than getting your hands on a mega drive game.

To be fair, one half of my house is a literal online retro games store, so perhaps my experience circa 2020 is not the norm.

But also to be fair, back in the day you could simply walk down to the nearby shops, buy the cartridge and play it as soon as you got home.

I'm not necessarily making an argument as to why everyone should own a Mega Drive in 2021 (although if you enjoy collecting physical media, there are some fantastic hidden gems on that machine - my personal favourites are Rocket Knight Adventures, Alisia Dragoon and Shadow Dancer!), but modern console gaming has become a lot less streamlined than it used to be.

With the PS5 and Xbox Series X emphasising their ultra-fast SSDs, I can only see this becoming worse.

When I launch a "modern" game, the auto-updater "jumps right in" and plays with my system. Sometimes it loses, like in the reported cases of Steam wiping whole disks. Then, sooner or later, if everything goes well, I might have an opportunity to play the intended game instead of "Storage Space Manager 2021 SSD Edition", "Backup Busters", or more hardcore multiplayer titles like "Server Overload".

Nowadays I play mostly Android games.

Anything that is over 300MB, just gets a big no, no matter how cool it might be.

Same applies to any game on Windows Store.

Wanted to play Rocket league with my friends one night. Had to reinstall and download 16 GB! For some radio cars driving around in an arena, what the H? This should be 500 MB tops, and that would be generous. But it was nothing to my gamer friends, they couldn't understand why I'm so upset. Look, I've got kids and I have no time to wait for a 16 GB download when all I have is 2 hours to play. Another time I wanted to play some Minesweeper and found out it's not included in Windows anymore, you have to create an _account_ with Microsoft to download it, and lo and behold, it's over 100 MB. Like really? This should not be much more than 100 KB, 1 MB to be generous.

When it comes down to it, developers are disrespecting users, whether it's disregard for the compute (Web slowness), bandwith or storage. I can understand if textures are higher res these days, but in many cases I suspect it has more to do with skins, IAP and general developer laziness.

Buying and downloading Valheim was a breath of fresh air though, something like 1 GB and a beautiful game.

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