Elefant in the room moment:
Guess what, people aren’t rabid fans of your generic brand product if you write MONETIZE all over everything in fontsize 64?
Who would have even started to think, huh?
otoh, that
is a more telling stat:
I am buying the really big duds, and thus part of the problem 
you know what, if only looking at these images, i’m super ok with the fantasy scenario of roblox eating this market
look, i’m as much of a fan of the academic prehistoric of videogames as anybody else here, but calling the industry “70-years old” is stretching credulity
Gamers have been clamoring for a sequel to the Difference Engine classic Charles Babbage’s ‘Math’ for over 200 years
It’s really like 45-50 at most, right? Even with all those weird oscilloscope games in laboratories
Yeah I would personally count the modern industry as a post video game crash of 1983 phenomenon, so 42 years old
pong is 1972
2600 is 1977
yeah that first decade counts, MUDs were around in the late 70s and recognizable arcade games started to come out by 1980. the history of video games that most people could play at home is pretty uninteresting pre-C64/Famicom so if you’re framing it in terms of actual home sales I am sympathetic to the idea of not really wanting to count pre-crash because the stuff that made it out of mainframes and arcades was not that much more than a curiosity and a fad
if you’re looking at a list of 2600 games it’s remarkable how many of the good ones of those even are 83 and later because they were ports from other platforms
various companies were making and selling stuff. it seems very odd to discount that period on this basis.
yeah discounting the 2600 and, like, space invaders and pac man, ultima and wizardry, etc. does not make a whole lot of sense to me
yeah I guess historically notable Apple II games were coming out since 1980 at least
70s videogames just really aren’t very interesting but you’re right
pinball got gentrified into being video games
pinball has a century-long history
video games are 100 years old
qed
The first video game was avoiding the train coming out of the screen.
I’m not saying that video games aren’t older, but the video game industry itself only solidified post-crash imo
The first boomer shooter came out in 1947
yea that presentation is very US-centric (labels rise of gaming in China a concern cuz it is likely 2 lead to domestically produced/purchased games rather than reliant on imports ) so I think in terms of how that specifically is defining the industry it essentially is like, post-crash, US, consoles regrouping in toy sector." 70 years is lazy wiki work.
Smaller-scale amusement facilities in general. Target shooting for prizes, minigolf, mazes.
I visited an old timey New Jersey boardwalk last year and the aesthetic had more than a little in common with Mario Party. There was “wizard minigolf” in a building with castle parapets, and an another one that featured an ape piloting a helicopter
even seriously starting to introduce the idea that we can just go straight back to any kind of arcade back in the late-1800/early-1900s starts giving me flashbacks of having to read about the density of nickelodeons in NYC
re: roblox, fortnite valorant etc - i think we are also forgetting a bit how much all the live service model stuff skyrocketed completely during the pandemic. if you are a Youth who only got into pc gaming out of boredom in 2020 your perception of the gaming landscape, and how to find cool new stuff within it probably is going to be markedly distorted because of the rapid shift at that time.
and to a certain degree i totally understand the impulse of “hopping on” to some big f2p thing (for me it was mobas, plural, in college) partially because my relationship with the dopamine cylce totally does prioritize something that can take you through that emotional ride in a 30 minute session as opposed to, instead, incrementing an hour a day at a longer single player thing even when i know it’d be a more interesting use of the time by the end.
====
my initial reaction to the idea of f2p dominance being because of cost-prohibitive factors had me thinking that that was really the reason i started digging up indie games in the first place -
then on further introspection honestly all of that stuff is really a skill you have to pick up in and of itself, and its not really a pathway that explains itself well any more, or maybe not as well as the Epic Games Store explains/justifies its own self. i remember having had to be introduced to gamejolt by a friend, and after learning to parse what i was interested in or could even get from sites like that started tracking more things down and finding glorious trainwrecks or whatever. and that was probably all multiple years into owning a pc that i got solely out of interest towards the minecraft alpha. so i guess its just about the pathway towards that stuff and maybe that’s getting more murky
i think my first encounter with ‘kids dont get indie games’ (this was circa like 2018) was being loosely involved on an itch release, and it getting a ton of traffic in from some kids-centric gaming youtuber who put it in a ‘garbage grab bag’ or somesuch. and it turned out what he had actually done was just visit the itch front page and download 5 or so of the top trending things on there, and i think this was back when it was more curated by leafo so it was all just objectively polished rock-paper-shotgunny stuff. it was mostly a funny experience to me but also remember being baffled that there was this total presupposition of none of these things having any enjoyable qualities. and maybe its fine to roll my eyes at that but it did get more downloads as a result so clearly those viewers got a somewhat different message than he was framing the games as.
and god now i’m even pulling up memories of being a freshly internet-enabled tween and diving from the jokey lets plays of ‘facade’ into smaller channels that were playing indie games entirely ironically(CW mostly annoying guy doing voices) but a lot of that sentiment going totally over my head. and seeing a letsplay of American Dream and mostly just thinking ‘huh ive never seen a game like this before’
and i am kind of trailing my thoughts here but i think that tiering of “realness” mostly just exists as a type of mental framing that can be dismantled pretty easily once you just get exposed to the right things and pick up the ‘language’. it sucks that this is the default, and maybe youtube has a part in defending that monopoly but im sure there are also areas of it that actively teach that stuff?
so many arty indie games were just pure lolcow material for a lot of the internet outside of the indie space. like they’d see stuff on RPS or pop up on gamejolt or whatever and it was pure derision that other people could like or enjoy this thing. i even still hear from like big lefty twitter people later on who being forced to know about a Twine game was like this great personal trauma to them somehow. like just total sneering derision. and there was plenty of cringey stuff, but ofc all the interesting stuff got fully lumped in with it. it was just a space everyone seemed perfectly excited to throw under the bus, even tho most of the people involved were broke and traumatized.
i know i def felt like my relationship with the rest of the internet and esp youtube was very oppositional and i still feel very uneasy about people who come in with an understanding from many game publications at the time or more normie youtube, because it was a space that was so hostile to the sorta stuff i cared about. part of me still doesn’t want to make anything that is liked or respected by that crowd due to that, lol. and i really, really don’t trust any sort of pyrocynical type who comes in as a tourist to it without ever having participated in it.
it is funny to hear about people growing up just absorbing that stuff without realizing it that it’s supposed to be made fun of. that gives me some hope that the lolcow stuff can’t ever really stick in the way it tries to. the kids in the academic program i sometimes teach at are exposed to a lot of niche indie stuff all at once and while they don’t understand most of it and do def laugh derisively at it way more than i think is respectful or appropriate, i’m sure just being exposed to it makes the difference.
but maybe that goes back to why a lot of kids weren’t getting into it. the walls were up because of the amount of hostility existed from normie online game culture towards any artsy stuff. tbh that is one of the big reason i never made more games. like if i had to face hostility both from normie gamers and from other queers telling me i wasn’t making things in the appropriate way (plus general disinterest and confusion from industry people) then i just didn’t want to do it. i was making stuff for no one. and people within that community were just tearing each other apart constantly. and people who were sympathetic outsiders just stopped tuning in or caring at all.
anyway, i don’t know where i’m going with this. i def see people 15-20 yrs younger than me still interested in the same sort of stuff. honestly it’s probably the same number of people, it’s just that games as a whole are way bigger so there are way bigger numbers elsewhere. but it does make me sad how much so much shit got thrown under the bus and fell apart due to both harassment and the weight of people’s egos and is not known about by many people as a result.
