I mean, while this stance is obviously shitty and anti-consumer, it’s also not entirely wrong. Retro games are cool, and there sure are a lot of them. If you considered the quality and enjoyment factor of every game to be the same, it actually would be a pretty silly proposition to buy new games on new consoles compared to playing the older stuff.

Heck, I picked up a retro handheld and got my rom sets sorted out not too long ago and yeah, my gaming time has skewed way more heavily towards that older stuff and my spending on newer games has dropped off a cliff in a big way.

But of course, thats not entirely the fault of the retro games - the new games are not really offering the same type of enjoyment, are they? I mean after all, the reason a PS5 game costs 500x more to develop and needs brand new hardware and subscription fees and a digital only license that let’s them remotely shut the game off at any time is clearly because the new games are at least 500x better, right?? I mean surely it’s not like the industry has been completely gutted and cannabilized by the suits at the top in favor of naked profit grabbing at the expensive of any of the creativity and joy that devs used to put in their games, right?

Like, wandering around the fields in Ocarina of Time is maybe not quite as cool and immersive as the huge open worlds of Horizon: Zero Dawn. But is it 500x less cool? If I told you one can play on your phone, your tablet, your laptop, hell your watch practically, and the data file is small enough to send via email, oh and plus it’s freely available with minimal effort, but the other needs a 500 dollar box to run, the game is 70, some features don’t work without a 15/mo subscription, and it will only ever run on that one box and you can’t share it with your friends. Hell you could get the one game on real retro hardware for probably 50 bux soup to nuts. Like yeah, I really feel like retro games probably are hurting modern game sales, but mainly because modern games have become an obvious and icky cash grab that prioritize maximizing revenue and attention time at the expense of fun or entertainment value.

Obviously games as a product have always been moving that direction, so no game is fully immune, but they at least used to try and hide it, or pull you in with the cool creative parts so the corpos could shave off their fat share of the profits in the process. Now it just feels like there is so much momentum in the community that people just feel compelled to keep up with buying the new stuff, but I think people are starting to ask themselves why. And I think the answers they are getting back are getting thinner and thinner every day.

I’ve always said I am just surprised how bad these companies are at leveraging these back catalogs. I mean who knows, maybe the licensing issues are just way more insurmountable than we could ever imagine from the outside, but it just feels like such a waste of so much good art. Like, Nintendo’s virtual console - yeah I’d probably pay 5 bux a piece for digital versions of NES, SNES, and N64 games - if I knew I was actually going to own that game the same way I own a physical game. But they fumbled the bag so hard every single time they’ve put out a new system since then, completely shitting the bed on any kind of transfer option, or any way at all to feel like these are “digital assets” instead of just a movie theater ticket where you can gaze at their works briefly before they inevitably pull the rug out and shuffle you down the hall to another room with the same ticket price again. When, again, the alternative, is that you can fit an entire complete rom set of every obscure NES game ever made into a 50mb zip file and run it on the screen on your smart toaster. Like, they’ve made the choice really easy for a lot of people, and the answer is not “oh goody I’ll just pay them a subscription fee for the rest of forever to play a tiny curated slice of that library only on one particular piece of branded hardware (as long as they dein that I have the right to do so)”. And really, they have handled the retro back-catalog the best out of any of the major platform owners (xbox back-compat notwithstanding).

Like, maybe if they just tried to make makes that are enjoyable rather than just games that are profitable, maybe they could actually be both enjoyable and profitable, instead of only the latter. Or maybe if they just made the older games available in some kind of reasonable, same, fair way instead of either ignoring their existence or blatantly cash-grabbing to the max at every possibility, they could continue to make money on these older games instead of just driving what could be a huge and enduring customer base straight to the high seas where things are easy, loose, and just enjoyable without such huge pointless hassles wrapped around every aspect of the process.

Anyways, no I’m not bitter or anything, why do you ask?