Can you see yourself cutting off by a generation of gaming?
Can you see yourself cutting off by a generation of gaming?
Like, will there be a point in time where you think that with all of the games of yesteryear to play that are thousands and thousands, with thousands more forward ahead to be released. There's only so much time available to be playing so much in a lifetime.
So that begs the question, do you just decide on which generation of gaming you're comfortable reaching before saying "Yup, I'm good!"?
I think for me, my cut off has been the PS4/X-Box series X generation. The PS5 is now officially like 5 years old now as of this year which is mind boggling to think about considering people had a very hard time affording the damn thing as well as other consoles because of a certain pandemic and scalpers.
And I've not once thought about organizing my resources in any attempt to try and get one or multiple games for it or the console. I've committed to PC gaming full-time now. I am completely content with playing what games I've gotten in the past and my library could use my attention more.
I'm not worried about prettier visuals, when I can still have the option to slap just another newer GPU down in my PC and beef up the memory as well. My PC build was intended to run 95% of all of my games that no other PC I've had in the past could ever do. So, I'm good!
Not really. I always play to old and new games in parallel. But I have to admit that I tend to play old games more often now then in the past (50/50 now vs 20/80 in the past 15 years ago).
At some point, I realized I will never have enough time to play all the games I want. I would not even be able to play once again through all the games I played in the past even if I gave up new releases until my death.
I do not focus on a specific generation nor machine, I jump between them back and forth depending on my mood. Sometimes I play a few games from the same machine in a row, but it’s not a rule.
I think we have to accept this « frustration ». It’s not even limited to video games. You can’t experience everything, learn everything, go everywhere, in a single lifetime. Life is not a todo list after all.
In a sense, you can even see it as a « bless »: you will never run out of games to play in your life, even if you only enjoy a few types of games.
My only « rule » is to complete every game I start. I think it’s a waste of my time / money otherwise. As a consequence, it forces me to select my games wisely. I won’t start a game before I am sure I will find it interesting enough.
No. To each their own, but I think that'd be a ridiculous stipulation to place on myself and it's hard to imagine why anybody would want to do it outside of super niche reasons.
I don't see any generation of gaming. Maybe because I don't buy and play on consoles. Even consoles have started to lose generations with backwards-compatibility, re-releases, upgrades, and digital stores.
I play what interests me. And I buy even more than I play of what interests me.
The idea of having enough or too many games to play, I think I reached on about 1.3k games in my Steam library. Because a year has 365 days, so 1300/365 = 3,56, so I could play a different game every day for 3 years. That's unrealistic to match [for me]. Now I have 3.8k games in my Steam library. Which is fine by me; I support what looks interesting to me, and maybe I'll get to them, or some I prioritize, and some are bundled noise or freebies.
I'm not going to stop stumbling over new and interesting games though. And most certainly not evade them when I stumble over them.
My cut off was a decade ago, when I got my first child and I realised that my time was too valuable to spend it on gaming. Now I have a bit more time too waste and I've been looking into gaming again, but I can't seem to get back into the habit.
Cutting yourself at some arbitrary point on time makes no sense. I simply don't play games I'm not interested in, and play ones that I am. I'm looking forward to Civ VII while playing NES games.
OP seems to come from a console background, they have been indoctrinated with the "game goes with this console generation" thing a lot more deeply than PC gamers ever were.
My cut off will be when there are literally 0 games I have interest in.
For one, I see no reason to decide I'll never play any game made after a certain point, barring a hardware requirement that I don't want to fulfill (eg buying a new console). That's just arbitrarily limiting good media that I could enjoy.
Second, the "Game Library Completion" preoccupation is another mistake, imo. I understand feeling bad about "wasting" money, but turning one's hobby into a (monumental) task/chore isn't gonna help that. It'll probably just ruin that hobby.
All that said, do what makes you happy. If that's all you want to do, I hope you enjoy it.
Second, the “Game Library Completion” preoccupation is another mistake, imo. I understand feeling bad about “wasting” money, but turning one’s hobby into a (monumental) task/chore isn’t gonna help that. It’ll probably just ruin that hobby.
It is really just a sunk cost fallacy. The same applies to books, movies or any other media. If you don't enjoy it don't finish it. Doesn't matter how much you spent on it or invested into it in other ways. Stopping right when you don't get anything out of it is the best time to stop that is still available (given we can't change the past).
This console generation has been a thorough failure. I have a ps5 which is great to play my ps4 games, but I will only be investing in PC from here on out. Hopefully they release a more powerful steam deck soon that can play my ps3 and xbox360 reliability
I mostly play retro games, and/or games of franchises that I like. I don't really follow what's new or popular because I have better things to do in my life than spend it all on 'new exciting' things. The same with movies.
I see no reason to "cut myself off" at any point, I still find games released in the last few years that look interesting, and some with release dates TBD that look neat.
I haven't bought a new console since July 2015 and have no plans to buy a new generation any time soon.
When my current console dies, I might upgrade, but likely I will find a cheap used replacement and keep playing what I already have.
Someday I will update all my stuff, just not today.
I think depression and anxiety are taking care of that for me. I absolutely loved God of War (2018), but for whatever reason the scale of Ragnarok intimidated me so much that I put the game down within the first 10 hours and haven't been back.
Too real.
PS5
Here's the list of the 21 exclusive titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games
Graphically we've had diminishing returns for quite some time now. I also don't find myself that interested in the games from major studios because they're generally just not very good.
I don't see a reason to artificially limit myself, but there are more then enough games from the past to keep me entertained.
That said there are some games on the horizon I am looking forward to. The next Witcher and Civ VII come to mind. I'm sure their GOTY editions will be great!
I also don’t find myself that interested in the games from major studios because they’re generally just not very good.
Luckily they seem to be required to warn about their status with that triple A warning label in most sources mentioning those games. I hear some major game studios have even updated to the quadruple A warning label because their games are so bad.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to picking up Witcher IV with all the DLC for £10 on Steam in a few years' time
I wouldn't want to restrict myself to a specific platform or timeframe but I could give up some major genres. For example I'd be ok with letting go of all FPS and most 3D focused games (presentation, not rendering tech).
I'm a single player/casual coop guy for sure. I enjoy some multiplayer but not if it's crazy competitive. I'm not going to enjoy getting stomped by kids screaming into voip.
So yeah I know what I'm most likely to enjoy but I'll always keep an eye out for new stuff. And indie games seem to leverage older design principles. And it looks like true remakes are becoming more common
I haven’t bought any of the new consoles; the only thing I’ve seen come out that’s interested me but I can’t play on the previous generation is Microsoft Flight Simulator. Maybe someday I’ll get a Series X for that, but I think I’d enjoy the experience on PC better anyway (really curious to try it in VR with my Quest) so I think I’d rather spend the money on building a new gaming PC that can handle that.
I’m not consciously cutting off any generation, I just haven’t had the time for as much gaming now and I haven’t had the budget to pursue the latest and greatest, especially if I probably won’t have time to play it anyways.
Only console I ever got was the original Game Boy. But I'll definitely upgrade my PC at some point, there's only so many games I actually like and I don't think I'll be content just never playing the next Baldur's Gate 3. I'll have to upgrade my PC anyway at some point just for regular PC things, might as well buy a new GPU, too.
I might consider stopping when there's some new ubiquitous gaming technology that I'm just not into (e.g. I still haven't tried a VR game and I'm not keen on changing that anytime soon).
Only console I ever got was the original Game Boy.
Did you enjoy playing games on it? If so, I find that weird if you at least didn't give GBA or DS/3DS a try.
Depending on age they might have aged out of the kind of relatively primitive games handhelds had back then by the time those were released.
TBH I got it specifically to make chip music, in like 2011. Making music on it is pretty cool actually, but while I did try a couple of games on it it didn't really wow me. Even beyond the outdated technology, I don't really like playing games that don't let you quickload, especially when they're actually kind of hard or generally have a lot of unskippable repetition.
Not really, I wouldn't watch big names though, they're going to pump out the same stuff as always.
I would expect new and good games to continue to come out and I'm looking forward to them.
I stopped buying games after COD something, the last multilayer where you could host your own server.