Games

You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I've used it before when I can't pick what to play. You can apply filters too.

I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of "how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?"

I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.

But the thing is, if it's a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money

and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.

You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it'd still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I've played, because I've spent so many hours in the thing.

If people are playing these like crazy, you'd think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just...doesn't matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.

Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.

I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.

It's already on there

Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?

We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It's kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.

90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.

Indies are so good right now, and most without crazy DRM!

If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.

Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don't have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money to buy them.