you might want to get out more, gamers as a demographic are aging so as a natural consequence the retro community can only grow. retro now also includes up to and including things like the Wii, 360, PS3.
Thats a fair point, I don't count that as retro myself, but its probably retro to 18 year olds who grew up with it. I guess "retro" game playing is simply buying the game on the Sony/Microsoft store with your latest console and playing it. I guess to me retro is hard to find/play old school games, buying it on the Microsoft store just makes it an old game, at least in my opinion, but my definition of retro would be different to others.
So let me clarify once more what I said. "Retro gaming is more popular than ever". In pure numbers of people participating in the hobby, this is very much true. There are entire (single digit, but non-zero) businesses in my area dedicated to retro gaming (in that they derive most if not all of their income from it). Something I've not seen ever in my city in living memory. There are specialist niche interest groups like Analogue doing pretty interesting commercial things in the space (specifically selling FPGA clone hardware, and *not* making money from software sales). Online communities for retro gaming information and content also have more members, more active discussion, and more interest than ever before. As someone who has been in and around the hobby for a long time, it was literally something I once had to travel vast differences to find people interested in it, versus today where this stuff is far more common even in my local area, let alone online in numerous discussion communities. Now, I'm absolutely not claiming retro gaming is a huge percentage of any market. Merely that the individual numbers are up. I'm not claiming that there's a retro gaming gold rush or that manufacturers are falling over themselves to "get a piece of this pie" or any such nonsense. I want you to remove all and any hyperbole you might be adding to the tone at which you're reading my posts in your head, because I'm certainly not intending to put it there. Read these statements as flat and objective - individual participation numbers in the hobby are up. That is all. It's clear that mass scale commercial interest in it is small, and as a result difficult to make good money from at scale (even rights holders of old content admit that sometimes it costs them more to deliver retro content than they can make from it). But none of that changes what I'm saying: the pure numbers are up, and rising, as far as it being a hobby with individuals participating. So, once again, what I'm predicting is that with the advent of changing standards, niche communities like OCAU's little retro section will grow. No, not to squillions of users. But this sort of change pushes people away from the upcoming mainstream and into things they want to stay familiar with. Consider that DOS and early Windows 95 gaming was once very much mainstream, and today is very much retro. The people who loved it then were current, and the people who stuck with it and didn't migrate on to new things with the rest of the market found themselves in "retro" communities. It wasn't that they changed, merely that the world moved on and they chose not to. And what I'm predicting is that the same thing will continue to happen as mainstream gaming changes and inadvertently alienates a (small) group of people who liked things just the way they were. It doesn't take a genius or a Soothsayer to see this coming. It's as inevitable as change itself. You're more than welcome to your own personal definitions of things. To most of the population, "retro" simply means "old". Any other subjective spin you want to put on it is yours alone. Etymologically speaking, the word is an abbreviation of "retrograde" which comes from the Latin "to walk backwards". The idea that we take a step back in time to look at old things, whether they were common, rare, amazing, or banal. Like any other study of history you'd care to mention. And like all things, age is relative. To a 20 year old, 30 year old hardware was literally another lifetime ago. To my 12 year old son, the Sony PlayStation turns 25 this week, and is something only old people talk about.
you know those fuzzy memberberries you get from a Sega game from the early 90's or an Atari game from the 80's? Now imagine you were born IN the 90's and your first console was a PlayStation 2.... retro as a market is only growing and bringing more people into it's ranks. The PS3 turned 13 this year - it's a bloody teenager!!
I watch a lot of retro YT channels and feel really old when the presenter says things like "growing up with the PS2 in high school".
I went from being the young kid in the electro-mechanical pinball repair communities to being the old man in the console collecting communities in a very short span of time. Was quite the dizzying experience.
Seen over at /r/Stadia... I have a feeling that the nbn is out of date. Don't think it was designed to handle this load.
I'm pretty sure that the isps will deprioritise game streaming traffic to the slow stream... 750gb is insane. Good luck to those hoping to see Stadia in Australia.
iPad? What? Also many of us are regularly downloading terabytes of data regularly. The only potential problem with Stadia in Australia is peak congestion if it becomes very popular.
That was in 5 days. @12.5GB/hr, its 12 hours a day for each of the 5 days. Not unheard of for gaming sessions over long weekends.
Looks like Google have plonked a studio in Montreal, and poached a bunch of high ranking Ubisoft employees to start making first party content. Interesting stuff. Shows they're in it for a while yet, at least.
was it one of them guys that riled linus with his debunked linux kernel spinlock testing? LOL (rumours say its a Goog game dev)
Poached Ubisoft gamedevs doesnt inspire me with hope given the mtx laden grindfests Ubi usually churns out. Juries out until the first trailer gameplay vid of their first game release.
they should have been creating content years ago, not after they launched the service. this to me is not a sign they are serious, at all. the only reason they can be in for the long haul, is money, buckets of money. kind of like how epics big plan is just to give away games until people start buying them.
Perhaps. But Google tend to try silly shit in silly orders. That's their jam. They cop criticism for it *constantly* in the business world, but you can't really argue with the results with the sort of money they make. Whether or not it works in the games biz is the question. I respectfully disagree. They seem to be more serious about it now than ever. Seems to be what you have to do to survive in the Triple-A market today. I mean, look at all the people who don't do that, and just go broke and vanish trying to do it "the old fashioned way". I've watched/read some pretty interesting talks/articles lately from prominent games devs around the world. All of them agree - it's harder than ever to make a living from video games - costs go up, profit goes down, game pricing at the retail end is bottoming out, and it's been going that way for ages. The moment you try and make a dollar, you get slammed by Kotaku readers / Twitter ragers / YouTube "celebrities" calling you out for being "lazy and greedy" for wanting to pay your rent and buy food. Clearly there's an enormous gap between what people *think* it takes to make a Triple-A game, and what it actually does. And honestly, ask any OCAUer about what they think about big companies like Epic, Rockstar, Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Treyarch and others, and all you'll get is a mountain of vitriol. Now Google join that list of "OCAU's most hated" because they too want to try and make some games to sell for profit. And yet, people keep paying for this stuff, despite the outrage. Looking in from outside the "hardcore gamer" cult, it's really, really fucking weird.
i dont forsee stadia making much if any dent in australia, at least not in the next 10 years till NBN V2 gets released to do what the original one should've done. and even then, it'll have to be DC's in australia.
