why is it so hard to replicate the golden age of gaming (late 2003 - early 2006 )Literally every single ps2 title tat came out that period of time was a classic.What went so right?
>tatgood morning saar
>>736469458it isnt. we've been in a golden age full of great video games for like 8 years now. go get indie demos from the steam next fest and you'll have like 20 games end up in your wishlist. if not then you're just a faggot
>>736469458the mid 2000s ps2 era was basically the 90s music of gaming and if u werent there ur literally a subhuman zoomer doomed to play skibidi toilet simulators forever. it was total pwnage before the industry got owned by corporate suits and cringe battle passes. we had actual bangers like mgs3 while u guys r stuck paying 20 bucks for a blue hat in a dead game. its like how 90s music had actual soul but now its just ai generated slop for your rotting tiktok brains. you cant replicate that ps2 magic just like u cant replicate the raw energy of a flannel shirt in 1994. honestly if u didnt experience the red screen of death on a fat ps2 u dont have a soul and u should probably just go back to watching streamers scream at colors. stay mad and stay broke while i enjoy my kino on a crt tv thats older than your entire generation. u guys r total noobs and its honestly epic fail for u.
>>736469458Pressure sensitive button
>>736469770Theres nothing here that compares even a fith of a percent to the PS2 lineup of christmas 2001.
>>736469458>late 2003 - early 2006That’s a very narrow golden age. Personally I’ve always believed video games had a long golden age stretching back to the early 90s through the late 00s.
>>736470859The mid-2000s was the peak because the probability of buying a PS2 that wasn't an instant classic was at its lowest point in history. The library density was so high and the hardware so mastered that you’d have to actually try to avoid a masterpiece.
>>736471107I disagree. The PS2 had a veritable mountain of classics but that was atop an even bigger mountain of games that ranged from mediocre to garbage
>>736469458>why is it so hard to recreate time
>>736469458Because the industry is hyper normalized. The suits at the top don't even play nor care about video games themselves, the literally only care about money and squeezing the consumer as dry as possible when games used to be passion projects for gamers, by gamers.
>>736469458>Literally every single ps2 title tat came out that period of time was a classic.Way to give the term "classic" no meaning.
>>736469458You could make a high end game within a couple of years. And a publisher would have enough studios and money to do it 5-6 times a year. This meant they were also willing to take risks with new IPs and genres. More games, more variety, more experimentation
>>736469458Low cost, low risk, and fast development timewith no expectation of future profits beyond the "hit and quit it" profit period at launchGAAS ruined gaming
>>736470859Ah yes the "when I was in my early teens" golden age. Weird how that always works.Anyway, for me gen 6 in general feels like the golden age, but I was 12 at the time sooooooGaming today is better, its just that the online discourse is filled with people my age(+-40) and they are angry games dont have the same magic it had when they were 12. We bitch about broken games on release, but most "broken" games have more polish than the games from the golden age. Games have just become a matured form so there is nothing really it can do to surprise anymore.
>>736469770btw my pronouns are she/him so use them when you address me
>>736475701>>736475559See this faggot: Less then 5% of just the AAA space is GAAS, but it somehow ruined gaming. Pure old man yells at cloud moment
>>736469458>why is it so hard to replicate the golden age of gamingbecause modern video games are designed by committee and via focus groupsthe people who actually know how to make games aren't allowed to as profit maximization (e.g. gachashit, microtransactions, engagement maximization, appealign to the lowest common denominator, (((global standards))) and (((modern audiences))), trend-chasing and cheklist-driven development) takes priority over everything else
>>736475753Most AAA games released today have intentions of using it to continue milking the customer through DLC, microtransactions, premium currency, seasons, whatever and the big publishers all develop their games on GAAS principles
>>736475753I know you really enjoy Fortnite zoomer but it's a fact that Sony went full retard this generation by deprioritizing all their exclusive first party titles in favor of chasing live service slop because all execs saw that Fortnite made $9bn in two years and wanted to recreate that for themselves.
>>736469458The golden age is impossible to recreate because it was a strange combination of large capital investment backing industry professionals with an indie mindset. These variables are now in totally different ecosystems, the professionals work on shitty slop for pigs, the money backs these mega flops and the indies with passion are all shitty amateurs so every game sucks.
>>736478829don't forget the banks promoting cultural marxism, reacemixing, and other kinds of cancer via low interest loans for pozzing up your game, and (((diversity consultants))), (((ethics departments))), and (((expression restrictions))) from the credit card and banker kikes
>>736478906They can't afford to fund that anymore and games are still going to suck because the talent is locked in factories pumping out creatively bankrupt garbage. The game industry is also such a miserable place to work that only low iq retards are going to try.
>>736478829> the indies with passion are all shitty amateursHow did the devs in the 90's become professionals?
>>736471107Ps2 is only second to the wii in terms of the shitloads of shovelware that got released
>>736479031A combination of perseverance in learning new things, trading tips and tricks with fellow developers and enthusiasts , keeping up with the state-of-the-art tech/art and just being motivated to work on this shit not just as a job but as a livelihood. All of the social aspects of this pipeline have been thoroughly gutted even if the technical capability is there and no one works in the games industry out of passion, but for money/fame these days in the West. I do think propaganda from bad actors has a hand in why games are so bad nowadays, but most of the problem is that the people in the games industry don't like the technical, artistic, managerial/business or human aspects of games and just use it as a LinkedIn resume spot or a source of quick cash.
>>736471762You just described any hardware system with decent success in the video game market. Your favorite little game box won't escape having its own mountain of dogshit showelware
>>736479031How anyone becomes a professional, they get good enough for someone to want to pay them. The game industry in the 90s was still a mix of amateur and pro talent depending on the company, by the ps2 era the standard had raised and you weren't getting in without some skill. By the 360 era people were going to school to learn skills to get in, now they dedicate their whole lives to getting in and they still can't.Indies now don't have to pass any bar, the lack of filter is good for quantity but not quality.
>>736479159It's clear that devs are less competent in working in smaller teams today, but I honestly don't understand why. Like you say it has most likely to do with the social aspects.>>736479325>you weren't getting in without some skillWhat's the skill indie devs nowadays don't have to produce something close to smaller scale ps1/ps2 titles? There's something they do lack that's a given, but what exactly? Also, "getting in" implies that spinning up a new dev team from ground up with fellow aspirants is harder than joining an existing one. Why is that? Everything being online so it's harder to get acquainted?What factors are stopping current day indies or small teams being as competent as the devs who bootstrapped the golden age?
it was a time with plenty of amazing games but it was also a period full of ungodly amount of ps2 shovelware nobody bought or remembers
>>736479909The thing that is lacking is real skill or talent. Old game developers were collections of enthusiasts, not of games but of their own respective fields. Artists, musicians, programmers were all talented nerds within their own area of expertise that were dabbling in this weird new medium, they were there for the money but the job was open ended enough for them to twist it toward their areas of interest.Indie devs are fans of games and they have no skills beyond that, everything is serviceable at best. Tech cannot make up for the lack of artistic vision or talent so even when they make a retro snes or ps1 games it looks worse and is just a bad imitation. It's not harder to start your own studio than to get into an existing one, you just have to start with 1 guy and scale up if you make money. it's impossible to get anyone to fund a team without experience though, in the 80s a kid in their basement could get funding from a giant corp because there was nobody else to do the work. In the 90s and early 00s a group of pros could get venture capitalist or publisher money, now it's impossible for even established AAA to secure it.What is stopping indies from gathering talent is it takes years to develop skills and then anyone with it is going to want a real wage, there's no money in indie unless you already succeed but you succeed as an amateur with no taste or skill, it's an endless cycle of mediocrity.
>>736480538garage dev teams are dead. the scope for a game has expanded massively, so gamedev costs shot through the fucking roofe.g. games like super mario bros 3 would barely qualify as a minigame today
>>736475701>Ah yes the "when I was in my early teens" golden age. Weird how that always works.I’m 28 anon. My teenage years were when things started going downhill. I’ve only realized that as I’ve spent much of my 20s playing games I missed out on instead of just new stuff.
>>736480538>in the 80s a kid in their basement could get funding from a giant corp because there was nobody else to do the work. In the 90s and early 00s a group of pros could get venture capitalist or publisher money, now it's impossible for even established AAA to secure it.I also thought about the funding aspect, but considering stuff like Kickstarter there's no excuse. The tools for getting funding are there, and many indie hits were funded this way. There's still far less of competent crowdsourced games than one would think, so it's not about the livelihood.Lack of vision might be it. Early games had to source their ideas not from earlier games, but by simulating some fantasy of theirs and mechanizing it into code and assets. Now there's a huge baggage of conventions and tropes to derive ideas from.
>>736475701>Games have just become a matured form so there is nothing really it can do to surprise anymore.The severe lack of imagination you need to say something this dumb is mind blowing. It's like when your stupid friend said that graphics will never get better than the ps2 because it was just too real already.
>>736481091Kickstarter is dead and that method of funding was always a temporary solution for games because they take too long to make and investors lose patience long before the project completes. It was still a better method than what we have now and while it lasted some of the better indie projects were crowd funded.
>>736481295>they take too long to make and investors lose patience long before the project completesIs that any different from early games which got lump-sum funding from a risk-taking publisher? Is the difference expectation of larger scope from current-day games? Obviously Kickstarter is temporary. The idea is to get the initial funding to make something to sell, which then can sustain the team from that point on.
>>736469458I like JRPGs, so it was far from a golden age. It was a time when RPGs became smaller, more linear, and more poorly written.
>>736469458last gen of>buy vidya game from gamestop, insert vidya game disk, play video game, save progress on memory cardelegant simplicity.PS3 introduced installing to disk, updates, DLC, cheevos, autosave, online play for normies.
>>736475701>early 1990s to late 2000s>the "when I was in my early teens" golden ageanon confirming he was mentally 14 for 20 years
Average ceo salary in 6th gen: A million per year.Average CEO salary now:Multiple millions easily without all the bonuses.Gamers don't care about graphics, but CEO's get bonuses because they employ a thousand pajets and make projects development take a decade.
>>736481174NTA but I can see why someone would think that. Video games can be broadly speaking placed into one of two distinct camps: games that create trends, and games that follow trends. Throughout the 90s to the mid 00s the pace of game development was so blindingly fast that not only were entire genres receiving landmark title after landmark title within relatively short timeframes, but the games following in their wake had only a short lag time. Many games were able to set trends and even more were able to capitalize on them.That just isn’t the case today, by and large. Truly landmark releases are a rarity these days and the games that try to follow them take so long to develop that they feel out of date when they do manage to launch.
>go to store>buy a game at random>it's goodzoomers will never know
>>736483003you can do that shit now online. In fact I emulated a few games at random and was pleasantly surprised recently.the games were the yakuza psp games and the arale game on psone
"Constraint breeds creativity."- Dmitri ShostakovichThe most midwit take of all is that artists should be free from constraints. The PS2's hardware was pretty constraining.
>>736469458Production costs were tighter and dev crews were smaller so more talent was needed to push out games with very narrow deadlines.Most of the great ps2 games were developed on 1 year dev cycles for that reason.Of course there was a lot of shovelware too but since evrything was physical if a game was terrible they just stoppped printing it.
>>736481504Having the ignorant consumer be your early funding is a bad idea. Look at the seething hatred pointed at people like Peter molenyeux or at the no man's sky devs and that was just after watching trailers, it's 10x worse when they have invested money. Games are just creative ambitions before they are made, shit changes and people get mad when their expectations aren't met. Traditional investors just want their money back and they dont care how you do it.
>>736469770stfu
All the shovelware moved to mobile.
>>736482697That isn't because we hit against some creative or technological wall, everything is still open to exploration. You already know its an economic issue about budgets and development time, meanwhile indies only want money so they regurgitate what succeeds. It used to be wagies playing with other people's money and on a short time limit which was better for exploration and innovation.In any case it's not hard to imagine shit that hasn't been attempted due to lack of percieved monetary potential, the stagnation is completely self imposed.
>>736469770lol kill yourself faggot
>>736469458Nobody will buy arcade slop where you have to replay a 10hr game over and over
>>736484423The new absolute midwit take is that the highest levels of creativity are a result of arbitrary constraints. Constraints are self imposed by artists with vision, any other constraint is a negative unless you are a shitty dithering artist who can't make choices unless someone forces it on you.
>>736486752Good point. Makes me want to do some reading to understand what made the early publishers willing to take risks on teams in the first place, and how the publishers funded the risk-taking.
