Patient Gamers

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 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.

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.

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.

at least the legal playtime that is

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.

Haven't played a single game from 2025. I don't even think I saw any that caught my eye tbh.

Oh no i lie - World of goo 2 is definitely on my wishlist. Maybe next year though, I'm still busy with Satisfactory at the moment

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

There were games released this year? Neat. I'll probably check them out. Right after another round of Tetris.

Makes sense, most games were released before 2025

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.

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.

All the new releases were under $20 indie or "AA" games like Microprose published titles.

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

Like a true patient gamer I didn't play a single game from 2025.

Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.

And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.

... Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.

Most permaonline 'hardcore' gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming 'journalists', and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers... they're all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.

This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.

Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.

At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.

People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically 'decade of investment' game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.

Patient gamer chiming in. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time and loving it. No bugs, a great expansion, and paid $20. For single player games the backlog keeps me a few years behind and the cycle continues.

I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.