I have a gtx 1080. 2025 games are mostly written in unreal 5. Unreal 5 is designed such that not even the highest end gpus can actually run it without framegen. And now also with mandatory raytracing.

Older games still work, and they look and run better for me.

People with massive backlogs: aw yeah, it’s all coming together

I do buy new games even full price on rare occasion. Regardless of that, there’s nothing new games do much better than old games besides graphics and that mattering declined hard once league of legends, counter strike, fortnite, minecraft, roblox, etc became people’s childhood to their ongoing adulthood games. I’ve met people that haven’t spent a dime on genshin impact while having played for 5 years

No one is missing out on the best 2025 games if they’re playing the best games of 2015. Time is finite and if it’s filled with good, what difference does it make if it’s new or old. You’re not missing out if you’re playing the best games of 2000-2014 in 2025.

I follow emulation on Android communities and people love playing the greatest hits of the PS2, Gamecube, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and it seems to mostly be teenagers. And now we’re getting good PC emulation support and PS3 and X360 support is progressing. Switch on Android emulation is pretty good now. Android, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Legion Go, Rog Ally, GPD Win, Ayaneo. Even Switch 2. The relatively low power gaming scene is growing and that bodes well for “classic/retro/oldies” gaming.

It’s been 12 years since the PS4 launched. Early PS4 games don’t play much different than 2025 games. The classics oldie radio station of games are soon going to be very modern. 2007 Bioshock era games are already very modern and look pretty good too

Fascinatingly, this number can’t even include Fortnite, since it’s not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It’s not all “New releases failing.” A lot of it is “Games have a much longer lifespan now.”

Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren’t old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They’re in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They’ve never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.

So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You’ll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it’s all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that’s frankly a good and healthy thing. We’re seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that’s genuinely fantastic news for the medium.

It’s weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there’s ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn’t been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it’s incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it’s one of the best RPGs you’ll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it’s one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we’re getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter… And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it’s inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.

People don’t buy new games anymore because they often release incomplete. Why would I buy a game that is offering only 25% of its content. I’ll wait for it to be don’t and buy it at a discount in a year. Thanks

The gaming industry for new games being released is brutal. The competition is sky high, and all you need to think about are games like Stardew Valley or Skyrim. There are so many options to choose from, a new young gamer has barely any reason to pay full price for any new games. We are entering the “Please play out game! It’s free!” phase, and still no one will spend the time. Time and attention are the most valuable thing.

I played like three games from this year. PEAK, MH Wilds, MK World.

The joy of playing older games is that they run well since they‘ve had years of patches and there‘s been years of faster hardware to power through most of the lack of optimization. And they‘re about a quarter the price. For running four times worse, new games also certainly don‘t look four times better.

It doesn’t help also that new GPUs and now even disk drives and RAMs are ridiculously expensive.

I am sure the end goal of corpos is to turn this into another subscription service.

If they already made all the games we ever need, would they start taking them away just so we have to buy new ones, instead? This is the future of steam when Gabe dies.

Fourteen percent seems huge though, considering video games have technically been a thing since, what, the 70s or 50s.

New games are expensive and the all those UE5 games run like crap, cause I can’t afford high end hardware either. Of course I’ll just play old games.
And thanks to AI hardware is getting even more expensive.

I kinda gave up buying new stuff because of all the editions bullshit. Complete, Deluxe, Gold, Ultimate, Season Pass, Whatever The Fuck Else Special Director’s Cut - yeah, yo ho ho ho your capitalist ass straight to the fire sell.

My method of patient gaming is to only buy games that are $10 or less

Just got subnautica, hades 1, disco Elysium, oxygen not included, hollow knight (I’m sad to learn I don’t like platformers that much…), kerbal space program.

Shit, I have so much to play for the next 5 years just there.

Factorio and Hades 2 were my exceptions, got them full price.

Next year it is going to be even lower with how prices are going. Upgrades are just not feasible anymore.

Which probably only proves that Steam Machines is going to be more than enough for everyone.