Interesting article here, but I think it misses the mark.I get the nostalgia is huge, I agree with that point, but I think its because retro games are not micro-transaction ridden heaps of garbage like most games are these days!
AND most importantly, they are way more fun and don’t take themselves so seriously! They are genuinely entertaining and foster escapism for the player.
Thoughts?
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It's more fun, a lot of gaming nowadays is all about "online stats", it's about public leaderboards, the pressure gamers face these days is insane, our gaming when we were 12-18 was about fun, it was about gaming with friends, on your own, there was no pressure to "be the best".
I often wish the "public" side of personal gaming, just wasn't a thing.
Whilst I agree with you, I think with gaming (at least multiplayer games), you'll always have that sense of competition regardless of the era of games. Arcades had leaderboards, when they entered the home as consoles there were always local multiplayer games of who is the best which branched out to local and national tournaments.
I think with the rise of the internet (and at least the first digital nomads), anonymity was very important so that created a culture without consequence so it was normal to have inflammatory remarks and trolling. Thus if you weren't playing the best you'd get trolled or called out on being a n00b.
I was legit about to post this as well - damn you MURRRAAAY!
But I think its common place now that we see people wax nostalgic about times gone by. It's the same with fashion trends and the changes with skinny jeans coming back into style. Like the rise in vinyl, I think people are seeing the appeal of the culture and aesthetic of the past rather than when it was actually used in the past as the forefront of technology. It's now a novelty to look at the clunky accessories, pixel graphics, low polygons and chip tunes.
You can check my post about it here: https://justabout.com/wasd/video-game-events-tell-us-what-you-love-about-them-and-why-for-dollar4#post-19820
With my very small sample size of my 13 year old nephew, the retro games are simple overall, nice that they are smaller and "it's fun to see how you old people had to live".
He doesn't seem to mind microtransactions that much, he's very good about just not buying them, which based on the billions of dollars companies are making from them shows him as an outlier.
As an elder millennial, retro games are 100% nostalgia for me. I'm very much a "just don't buy them" attitude towards microtransactions. We've got a team outing at work coming up in a couple of weeks and we are going to a "retro arcade" that opened up late last year. It won the vote with 90% of the people picking it. I think the majority of my coworkers are millennials, with a couple of gen-x mixed in.
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