30 year old gamers feeling disenfranchised?

[xDarc]

33 years old. Never made the switch to PC gaming.

The 30 somethings who never crossed over to PC gaming really puzzle me.

Since I was about 5, I've had a PC in my house.

You had a PC in 1987? Are you Matthew Broderick from War Games? How much were those back then, several thousand dollars?

I had to beg, BEG for a nintendo at 7 years old. At 12, I put all of my savings up to help our family buy our first commputer. A 486 DX2 66Mhz Packard Bell. It cost almost 2,000. You just had one laying around at 5?

We obviously come from very different backgrounds, and it's no wonder you would see things differently. I bet you had shelves filled with NES cartridges. Mine wouldn't have filled up a milk crate even half way.

 

[robobengt]

I'm 32 and disagree. Even though I love all those old games (I recently started to give GOG a lot of my money) I still love the new games coming out. In fact, I have about 40 unplayed games in my to play-list and I'll probably never find the time to actually play them.

 

[surg3n]

I'm 37, grew up playing the C64, Spectrum, and AmstradCPC - plus the older consoles like the Atari2600. Really, I don't think I'm neglected at all, but I do play a very diverse range of games and have lots of platforms (PC,Mac,iPad,360,PS3,Vita,DS,Wii).
Most recently, I've been playing Battlefield3, Legend of Grimrock, and Trials Evolution. I completed Skyrim and am kinda waiting on expansion packs before I play much more of it, my character is about as bad ass as he can get but the decent quests have all been done. I used to play a lot of RockBand2, but that kinda played out, they destroyed all the fun that was in RB2 - seems that selling peripherals is more important than providing a solid game, that's why the franchise is all but dead... I'd rather just have RB2 with more songs, it doesn't need anything else IMO - more songs and less rape with the DLC costs.

I have a great time playing Battlefield3, I feel that on a whole, there aren't many annoying players compared to other online games. I tend to always have a good game, I play practically every night for at least an hour. Trials Evolution is awesome, it's addictive and challenging, and when you get to the finish and get gold, well it's a good sense of achievement, because I probably had to try about 30 times to get there.

Anyone who remembers the old 90's dungeon crawlers (Dungeon Master, Captive, Bloodwych, EyeOfTheBeholder etc) should buy Legend of Grimrock - it's so much like Dungeon Master from the ST/Amiga days, but with modern visuals. That is one pretty challenging game as well. Old school and caters right for 30-somethings who remember having to buy graph paper for drawing maps.

Something else I've taken to, is my iCade controller, it's like a little arcade machine for your iPad, gives a decent quality joystick and buttons, and more and more games support it. For instance the Midway/Atari etc arcade games, and the C64 and Spectrum emulators support it. Theres a Spectrum emulator and 101 games for £8.99 - very nicely put together and it has most of my old favorites - playing these games with a clicky microswitch joystick does them justice. I guess you could call me a nostalgic gamer, and if anything I'd say I was spoilt for choice these days - although that is relatively new, with the appreciation for retro games growing.

 

[malestrithe]

You had a PC in 1987? Are you Matthew Broderick from War Games? How much were those back then, several thousand dollars?

I had to beg, BEG for a nintendo at 7 years old. At 12, I put all of my savings up to help our family buy our first commputer. A 486 DX2 66Mhz Packard Bell. It cost almost 2,000. You just had one laying around at 5?

We obviously come from very different backgrounds, and it's no wonder you would see things differently. I bet you had shelves filled with NES cartridges. Mine wouldn't have filled up a milk crate even half way.

Maybe not Personal computers, but we had computers in the house.

I was 5 in 1984. Apple IIe was 500 dollars. Making room for newer models.
1987 we had a Commodore 64/128. another 500.
First Windows OS computers was in 1992. Again 500, but guy that built was a friend of my dad, so he did at cost plus 10 percent.
1996, had a little love affair with apple and had a hand me down macintosh. It broke in 2002.
1999 onward the 400 dollar computer at Walmart.

Video game crash of 84 was a great time to be a kid. We got the Atari, Colecovision, and Intellivision for 35 dollars each. Games were 1-2 dollars at KayBees toys and hobbies. My mom was never rich, but could justify spending 50 dollars for games a month because the store was on a liquid diet.

I only had 5 NES games, Super Mario Bros. Ultima 3, Werewolf the Last Warrior, A Boy and his Blob and Final Fantasy. Dad had about 100 games, which was three milk crates worth. He thought it was easier to buy love than to actually be a good parent. Wished he was a better parent, but that is in the past.

Snes had 5 games. Rented games like a mad man those days.

Had 30 Playstation 1 games, rented more than that.

When I started working in 1999, my disposable went towards gaming. Still continues to this day.

We're not rich. Parents doted on me a bit too much. My brother and I were the only grandkids on my dad's side of the family, which is why we had the computers. Grandma loved to spend money on us.

 

[Syzygy23]

for me the situation is bad when i have to go to kickstarter and fund the games i want. when entire game genres virtually disappeared because an executive thought its no longer worth making or that gamers are stupid and cant handle anything remotely complicated

What's even MORE sad to think about is that nobody ever lost money betting on the lowest common denominator.

You can have a good game, or you can meet your bottom line and everyone can eat for another month and keep a roof over their heads, maybe even put their kids through private school if you make enough.

Kickstarter looks to allow us to all have our cakes and eat them too.

 

[Tanakh]

Tribes is not really to my tastes and I did play BF2142 and BFBC2. I played the demo- excuse me- open beta of BF3 and found to be even less tolerable than BFBC2. My issue with those games is the overuse of radar and spotting which discourage movement, the snipers which discourage movement, the cone of fire which discourage movement, the prone position which discourages movement, you get the picture.

FPS games that don't give you the speed to dodge the other guy's fire while shooting back, aren't real FPS games IMHO.

Could you imagine if this is how 90's shooters played? How fucking boring it would have been to watch guys like Fata1ity play in big money tournaments? I know how these modern shooters want me to play, and I understand how to succeed at them, I just don't want to because it is boring.

Lots of people have no idea what I am talking about, but old skool shooters are like miracle whip. How do you know you don't like it if you haven't tried it? That's what we're facing today.

I gave modern shooters a chance, but tastes like someone pissed in my wheaties.

Humm, well, they have been patching BF 3 to make harder to see enemies easily from across the map. But yeah, i only play very sporadicaly and on no kill cam hardcore servers, getting your ass from one point to another can be hard. That said, Tribes is awesome, as a UT lover that game hits right on the money, a shame i dont have time for it.

Nway, i think your phrase "not really to my tastes" nails it down. You sound exactly like a Smashing Pumpkins or Chemical Brothers fan saying that music now sucks and don't fit your tastes; no shit, you want it to sound and feel like Corgan did when you were young. In my experience that happens in 2 cases:

- Your life is in the gutter and you are shifting the dissatisfactions from another areas of your life to gaming, much like that thread recently of a guy ranting about not caring for Diablo III and addint at the end "BTW i am also totally broke and might be homeless soon"; or a lot of teens here that rant about games been crap and then say "ohh and my long time GF duped me".

- Your mind simply stayed there regarding taste, that also very common, you were full of wonder and discovering new things and your preferences just stayed there, in the 90s. The "You're Getting Old" southpark episode is very good at describing this.

At any rate, games have always been like this, lots of shit, some amazing stuff. Acrobatics based FPS is indeed gone, but then you bury them with your kittens and move to the good stuff being made now, just like we had to to with grunge :´(

What's even MORE sad to think about is that nobody ever lost money betting on the lowest common denominator.

Welcome to planet earth, with Harry Potter being the best selling non religious book ever and Avatar the highest grossing movie, or to put it another way "No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people".

 

[drednoahl]

I've advanced beyond my thirties, but most of my friends are in their early thirties and have tired of what mainstream gaming has to offer these days. Only two of them have a current console; the rest have either given up on gaming (due to over-hyped games not meeting expectation) or moved on to PC. Having said that my friends are not hardcore enough to come on forums, but they were the type of gamers who HAD to have the latest games at launch. So what happened?

My take on what has happened depends on the genre of game and particular friend I'm thinking of, but consider that a typical thirty something gamer would have experienced the very best of what PS1 and PS2 had to offer, and have at least seen or played on the best games on other manufacturers machines of the time. All those games became franchises and almost all got improved with further iterations. Whether I agree with my friends or not though, games such as GTA, Metal Gear, Resident Evil, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo on this generation of console haven't been as awesome as their earlier incarnations. Then the likes of CoD which I expected to be the saving grace of this generation, and that's not evolved either unless anyone counts tea-bagging or derogatory comments from a fourteen year old about "yur mom's genitalia" as evolution.

At least as far as my friends are concerned, gaming has gone out of fashion. If they turn out to be right about that I will be a happy man.

 

[putowtin]

31 and still loving it.

So here's is who I want to here from. If you're 30, and you started out with the children's toys, the consoles, and as you grew up- you moved onto PC and witnessed the glory days of the mid 90's; I want to hear from you.

Glory days, sure that seemed like that at the time, looking back we've moved forward so quickly (in graphic's and hardware ability) sure the glory days look great in hindsight but at the time all we did was complain about broken games and crashes....

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

what franchises or gernes do you miss or want to see again?

Good Question.
31 - and i`m missing the glory adventure games of the early nineties. TellTale did a good job with Sam&Max and Walking Dead seems promising but it could be way more. T.Schafers Kickstarter project showed that i`m not alone on this and i hope we`ll see more in the future.


I`ve been a gamer since the C64 and switched from pc to console and back. Since i`ve never really gotten into rpgs i`m not missing much today (currently ps3 user). In times when i`m fed up on gaming i take breaks and after that it`s fun again. That never changed.

I guess aslong as i`m able to use my fingers and my eyes are ok i will be gaming.

 

[distortedreality]

I'm almost 30 and there's still plenty of gaming coming up to keep me interested.

I do tend to think that more games are being marketed towards a younger audience, but there's been enough marketed to us older farts to keep me interested.

 

[kabooz18]

I'm 25 but I've been playing since 92 on consoles and PC but mainly PC games

the only thing I can say for everything is it's different
some new franchises are better and some are just more streamlined (A.K.A. dumbed down)
which to a point is super awesome.

for point&click adventures it was pixel searching don't have to do it anymore

for shooter is was controls they just got better and better (though they got a little worse when they migrated to consoles, since sticks are harder to control than a mouse is)

for RPGs it's hard to explain since the oldschool RPGs are almost vanished and the new ones were for a time just a different experience (and they still are) but lately they got streamlined so damn heavy. And heavily value combat and or exploration that most of them are boring to me now. (e.g. Skyrim or Risen 2) I'm not saying that those aspects should be less valuable since they offer a great experience and many people love this only that the rest should not be forgotten. (for example, for skyrim it would be Characters since I can't remember any of them. And Story mostly and I'm not talking about LORE since skyrim got plenty of that and very good lore at that)

something that happens across the board to some development teams is BUGS games these days are way more complex so the complexity of the code rose proportionally but that is still no reason to put a half broken game on the market. Some might say here gamers today feel entitled, and yes but that was always the case and it is our right, imagine someone sells you a almost broken chair
or a car that crashes every 5 kilometers (or 5 miles for america since everything is supersized there) you'd be furious and you'd get your money back


so TL;DR is some things are better (controls) some are worse (too much streamlining and Bugs)
but there will be people who love the games they develop and people who love to experience those games

EDIT: I still play more games than I actually have time for XD

 

[JediMB]

I'm 27, and while I usually don't have a lot of games that I actively look forward to, that doesn't mean games I'll like aren't released. Sometimes it feels like I discover a new awesome indie title every week or so.

And now there's Kickstarter. The games I've backed there are the ones I'm looking forward to the most at this point in time.

 

[Darks63]

I dont feel disenfranchised really the only thing about gaming today i dislike vs gaming from when i was younger is there seems to be less developers of game and more big studios that tend to put out only money making type games and stray away from trying new and interesting things.

that and the fact that every new version of windows makes playing classics from my earlier days hard to impossible to play and the decline of my hand eye coordination.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I'm 30 been gaming since about 1984-5 and I'm loving the games we have at the moment. I'm playing Arkham City and it's great, looking forward to Diablo 3 aswell.

I just finished Grimrock and got all the achievements.

I think there is plenty for older gamers, if anything they are starting to make more mature games than ever.

 

[squid5580]

The glory days of the 90s. Okay I'm not thirty yet, but sheesh, quit sounding like there won't ever be anything as good. Hell, my formative gaming years were in the 90s (I started young) and I don't even think they're that good, and in theory I should be the most nostalgic for them.

Well I am 36 and I am playing the types of games I dreamed about playing in the 90's (and 80s).

 

[Casey Bowen]

I'm 40 and go back to PONG.

I still game on pretty much a daily basis. That being said I don't buy as many games as before. Not always because they're just not great -- but because I'm a family man and that takes up a lot of time.... and that is time I wouldn't trade for playing games because my wife and daughter mean a lot more to me than the gaming over the decades.

So with buying fewer games I do have to be pickier about what I get. But with backlog of titles, Borderlands 2 and Xcom Enemy Unknown this year I should be well set.

 

[surg3n]

The glory days of the 90s. Okay I'm not thirty yet, but sheesh, quit sounding like there won't ever be anything as good. Hell, my formative gaming years were in the 90s (I started young) and I don't even think they're that good, and in theory I should be the most nostalgic for them.

Well I am 36 and I am playing the types of games I dreamed about playing in the 90's (and 80s).

Good point. If I remember the lofty ideas I had as a kid about what games might be like in the future, I don't think I imagined they'd be as good as they are today, esp games like Fallout3... as a kid growing up in the 80's, watching those survival movies, end of the world stuff, well Fallout3 would have blown my mind. Maybe us oldbies are a bit too jaded sometimes to remember that. I remember spending a long time wondering how awesome virtual reality will be... well I bought a VR headset, and it sucks - what we do have are engaging worlds to explore and experience, we should probably be more glad about the Mass Effect games, and GTA, elder scrolls etc etc.

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

I'm not a huge PC gamer but other than that i fit your critera. Games are sort of a mixed bag for me right now. i'm seeing some really awsome stuff in gaming. Assassin's creed's climb anywhere mechanics and intresting story system, saints row over the top antics, skyrim's huge detalied world to explore. But i'm also seeing alot of lazy and greedy shit pulling the industry down. Assassin's creed seems to be milking the series for as long as it can get away with it, saints row is starting to nickle and dime you for add ons, and skyrim while fun as hell is much shorter than the previous elder scroll games.

Right now games have the potential to be more awesome than ever but game companies are becoming greedy evil shits and they're sucking all the fun out of games. and what i'm hearing about upcoming systems makes me think i'm likely not going to be a gamer for much longer. Digital only games that cost as much as physical games, cell phone like subscription plans for consoles.

Even right now some of the shit game companies are pulling is making me want to game less and less. i still do enjoy mainstream games but i don't know for how much longer. Ninja Gaiden 3 was a joke, Mass Effect 3 appeartnly has a bad ending (haven't played it yet), Sillent hill isn't scary anymore. All games have to have some kind of multiplayer or they aren't made.

I think...I hope what i'll see is more indie studios embracing previous gen game engines and using them to make cheaper but fun games that i can enjoy. I'm seeing promise in the Kickstarter fund raiser games like Shadowrun Returns but its too early to call.

I don't want to give up on games. they're still fun but the corperations have become too greedy. somthings gotta give. either we find a way to make less expenisve but more unique games or i give up and actually do somthing constructive with my free time.

 

[Tallim]

34 here and I've been playing games regularly since ugh I was about 5 or 6. I have no real problem with games at the moment except with how generic everything has become. Even the exceptional games by today's standards are on par with mediocre-good games from the 90s. Obviously I'm talking about design, writing and mechanics there rather than visuals.

Mid to late 90s was a crucible of gaming, no one really knew how to tap into a large market and gaming studios were making whatever they could come up with which lead to some truly unique and wonderful gaming experiences. Something that is lacking in the industry at the moment.

Even going back to extremely old games you get a bevy of cleverly crafted experiences which are full of strong core principles. I still play some C64 games and enjoy them far more than a lot of AAA titles at the moment.

I think the main problem amongst PC gamers who have been gaming for so long is that a lot of fantastic games belonged to genres that are no longer marketed that often any more and there is little innovation in modern incarnations of genres that are common.

This is why I LOVE the explosion of the indie scene right now. Those people are making games how studios used to make games, pouring their heart and soul into a game that they want to make and free to experiment with mechanics and ideas that the "industry leaders" won't touch.

Am I disenfranchised? Not really. I can still find games that are worth my time but having played games for so long I have a huge catalogue of experiences to compare any modern releases to and so I am much more discerning about what I invest my time and money in.

 

[mrpropal]

31, I used to be a PC gamer, then I moved to the PS3.

I blame the Industry of making games that are too easy to beat, and too shallow in the art department. In need of a scapegoat for that, I'm almost becoming anti-American (I know). Yet I believe we could use a different gaming culture. For instance, one where in difficulty modes "Easy" means easy and "Insane" means INSANE.

I hate tutorials and crosshairs. Most HUDs take away the immersion more than they help. They should always be an option.

The company that best represent me, in this gen, are FROM Software, for the Souls and Armored Core series.

What I miss most is a space combat/trade simulator, or that underdog gem that is HardWar.

I'm starting to think there is something wrong with me though. So things are fine.