Comment by wraptile
3 months ago
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
3 months ago
These are not winner games these days. Gaming trends are so fast that indie games like the one where you play a duck with a gun is what's driving the gaming community these days.
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of - they're playing live service games that have been around for years. Games like League of Legends, Counterstrike, Fortnite, Dota, WoW, PUBG etc. Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years. (Although Fifa and GTA definitely are.)
For example, the top 10 games in Korean PC bangs last week were:
1. League of Legends
2. PUBG (I think)
3. Fifa
4. Valorant
5. Overwatch 2
6. Sudden Attack (a KR FPS game)
7. Maple Story
8. Lost Ark
9. Dungeon Fighter Online
10. StarCraft (Brood War, I believe)
The next 15: Diablo 2 Resurrection, World of Warcraft, Diablo 4, Lineage, Eternal Return, Path of Exile, Warcraft 3, Black Desert, Cyphers, Aion, Path of Exile 2, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, Tales Runner, Final Fantasy 14.
Lineage and Brood War weren't even made in this millennium!
> I don't think it's entirely the case. They are on franchises, but not the ones you think of
I didn't name any franchise. I only mentioned Battlefield to compare it with the mentioned Duck-Game, as they are both on Steam where everyone can see the numbers. I mean if we are talking about the real big numbers, then we would be with Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, LoL, which are all not on Steam; making number-checking a tad harder.
> Games like Battlefield are up there, but I don't think they're the games people mainly play over the years.
As a Franchise it seems moving Fifa, very popular, but also seasonal peaks. Each new version shoves in players for a while, until they are satisfied again. Though, I don't really play them, so it's just external observation.
Man, I'm surprised DFO still in the top 10. I thought that game died out spectacularly.
To be fair Brood War was like a national pastime in Korea for many many years and there are still pro tournaments held multiple times a year that draw a decent audience. That game will never die in Korea.
That's a lot of guesswork for such a strong claim as yours. You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak (compared to #1 CS2 having only 1.8M). This didn't exist 10 years ago - the gaming landscape is entirely different in 2025.
This call that gamers generally play 1 game only is extremely dated especially when flavor of the month games are extremely in right now. I'm sure Valve with the biggest gaming dataset in the world didn't just dive into this blind.
1 - https://steamdb.info/charts/
> That's a lot of guesswork
It's not guesswork, it's reading the statistics. Gaming Reports are regularly showing that the majority of gamers and income is with only a handful of games/franchises.
> You can actually see gaming distribution on open steamdb[1] stats and every year the amount of games avg player plays grows higher and higher.
Yes, because the market grows. But look at the numbers, the top is always with the same games, with the same numbers, which are usually in a complete different league then the rest. The Top 5 Games have usually 10-20 times as many players as every other games. And, be aware that this is only Steam. The gaming market is much, much bigger than just steam. Steam is kinda its own bubble with a skewed view.
I'm not saying steam or indie-market is small, but people looking at PC and Indie-games develop a kind of natural filter for the real behemoths of the market.
> A linux native game called Banana got almost a million concurrent player peak
We have at the moment >3 Billion Players. 1 Million gamers for a shady shortlived hype-game is not bad, but it's not even remotely winning the market, or setting a trend. At best, it's setting a trend in a specific niche. Valve wiped out billions of value in CS-Skins some week ago. That's more market-influence than a free game with shady skin-business will ever gain.
The reality of native Linux gaming must be really sad if the top example is in essence "NFT" generator with minimal if no gameplay...
It is essentially a software toy people left running to generate random items some of which ended up being speculated on generating some money for "players".
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I would say that‘s a bit overly simplified, as much as the indie or indie like game scene is thriving, so is the online multiplayer scene. Gaming is huge and just because one thing is big doesn’t mean another is not. Not a zero sum game here.
Sure but not being able to play 4 games is not an indication of success either way. It's not 2012 when you had to have Call of Duty - you can not have battlefield, cod or fort nite and still never run out of incredible, popular games to play.
If you have a bunch of friends that have battlefield/cod/fortnite and want to play them, they will still do so without you, or at least heavily pressure you into getting them.
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Duckov is not indie. It's a reasonably sized game backed by a large (Chinese) publisher.
Sure, but those AAA games still exist, and people still want to play them.
As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
There's a nonzero chance that BF6/GTA6/etc becomes a thing that everyone wants to play. If all your friends are raging about how much fun it is and are all playing together, aren't you going to regret buying a Steam Machine?
Sure, you can still play Super Meat Boy, but that doesn't matter - they regret what they can't do.
According to your logic, then no one should be currently buying a Switch 2, because it won't play GTA6. Yet people are buying that console!
Is it you, or is it the children? No, it's definitely the children who are wrong.
The Switch 2 has exclusives that people DO want. The Steam Machine does not.
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If there is a non-zero chance that I might want to play such a game, from time to time, I can stream it.
Why would I want to limit my options for occasional AAA gaming to the graphics supported by a particular console, when I can spring for GeForce Ultimate for a month and play BF6 with amazing graphics at 120 FPS, on my TV or my laptop, or my iPad or my phone? And play with even better graphics two years from now, as the state of the art advances.
Sure a different option would likely be best for people who know they want to play AAA, all the time. Although, even for many of these people, the Steam machine is probably a great second box for many, that gets you however many 100s or 1000s of titles they have in their Steam library.
But a fear based "you might miss out occasionally" argument is unpersuasive. Especially in a world where some games are exclusive. My swanky new PlayStation is no help if everyone is raving about the new Nintendo game.
>As a gamer, why would you want to spend a few hundred bucks on a gaming box, when it isn't able to play the biggest hits? Who would want to deliberately limit their ecosystem to indie games?
???
Look at steam top 100, sure there are 2 or 3 games you wont be able to play on there, but there rest work just fine. And sure there are popular games outside steam, but even if none of them worked (which is not true), for most gamers its a non issue. (And Valve is probably not really concerned about them)
The only games this limits are online competitive (most of the time FPS) games. There are plenty of gamers, myself included, that have 0 interest in such games.
In short even if 0 online FPS games are playable on steam console(which is not true), there are still 10s of millions of gamers, who wouldn't care.
As far as why wouldn't people pick something that can play 100% of games is because they cant. Even the best PC cant play Nintendo games, not all PS games are on PC or xbox, etc. You always have a trade off. And plenty of people still buy PC's,Deck, PS5's and Switch consoles.
My guess id more people won't buy it because, they want better specs, not because a few games wont work on them.
But that still leaves millions, potentially tens of millions of people.
Exactly, this competes with a second hand PS5.
Nonsense. People don't buy a PS5 and regret they can't play League of Legends. There's been games exclusive to one platform or the other since the dawn of time, yet people still buy them for the games they do have.
That thing is going to run a ton of games that other consoles don't.
Few customers are going to replace their PC with it, but if you have the cash and want to add a sleek console to your living room that will also stream from your desktop in a pinch, it's probably a great deal.
thats not accurate. they have improved, but the market does not look as you described