this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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[–] tal 159 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
6.4% were in League of Legends
6.2% were in Roblox
5.8% were in Dota 2
5.4% were in Fortnite

That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.

[–] GoumLeChat@jlai.lu 111 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don't have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.

[–] tal 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 40 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Free means you can easily get any friends to dip in and play which is a big factor.

[–] tal 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hmm. That's a thought. I guess that that'd mesh with them also all being multiplayer.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Also big up for Cataclysm: DDA. One of the greatest games ever made.

[–] tal 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it's very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!

[–] tal 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I'd say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is...kinda nuts. It's not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is "go check the code"...

There are also some military sims I've played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren't, they're probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don't bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In case you weren't aware (it sounds like you're not) :

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cataclysm

This isn't going to teach you how to play but it's an excellent reference wiki

[–] tal 2 points 2 months ago
[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I still haven't beaten The Wizard of Yendor, don't even talk to me about Dwarf Fortress hahah

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

NetHack takes me waaaay back. Blows my mind DevTeam are still working on it. I haven’t played in a few years. NetHack, Angband, C:DDA, etc are all games I play on long haul flights since they use the least battery and I’ve not been on a long haul since the pandemic.

[–] tal 3 points 2 months ago

Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.

NetHack and Angband don't do that.

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Free means a hell of a lot when you are a child with approximately $0 in expendable income.

[–] GoumLeChat@jlai.lu 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.

But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.

[–] logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)

[–] logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had "early access" packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.

[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p

[–] tetrachromacy@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It's rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that's 9 cents an hour, and I'm still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

Soo.. What I'm getting is that you kinda like a game called Catapult: Streets Ahead?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you've pretty much got it figured out.

[–] kionay@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

I'm playing Counter-Strike 2

... exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod

... that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago

[–] LacklusterGamer@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I read every one of those and thought. Well that's a new game. Apparently I'm old.

[–] tal 12 points 2 months ago

Apparently I’m old.

Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/

These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.

Nothing like a comment about someone's grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you've played in its original form.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

League of legends is two decades old now, so if you're thinking it's new, yeah that's on you 😜

[–] LacklusterGamer@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to be honest I just looked up the game for the first time and had no clue it came out in 2009. I hadn't ever heard of it until a few years ago so I just figured it was some new game. The whole warcraft/dota thing was crazy to me.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] tacofox@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I just learned that DOTA was a wc3 mod originally like last month, so I’m assuming that’s what they mean?

Edit: and how did I find out? Well, Basshunter’s “DOTA” music video of course. Which coincidentally I also learned was about DOTA the game lol.

[–] LacklusterGamer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Nope. I know about DOTA and how it has a bunch of spin offs. One of my best friends plays some weird betting game that is a mod of DOTA and he tried to explain the whole thing to me a long time ago.

[–] RadimentriX@troet.cafe 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

@tacofox @AwesomeLowlander wasnt LoL made by some of the original DotA modders? But somehow valve ended up with the rights for the name so they made DotA 2 as a standalone game? It's been ages since iv'e seen an article about the origins of those games :D

[–] tacofox@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sounds very valve-ish. But my knowledge ends at Basshunter 😅

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

See other comment thread for a bit of context

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

There were many people who worked on dota back then. There was no official version to begin with, you could find a dozen variants in bnet on any given day. Slowly it got centralised. Some of the modders ended up at LoL, others ended up at Valve. The name wasn't copyrighted, nobody really owned it. Valve kinda inherited it by virtue of hiring the guy running the mod team at the end.

[–] LacklusterGamer@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

So looking it up my guess is I played AoE over Warcraft, never understood DOTA, don't really like battle area games, and have only ever watched AoE in e-Sports.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The amount of times I "finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I've been putting off" and it's 7 years old. My kid is into "newer Disney stories" I don't know from my day... that are 25 year old films!

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 months ago

25 years so... Tarzan? Lilo and Stitch? The Emperor's New Groove?

[–] Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 2 months ago

My personal hypothesis is that everyone likes online multiplayer initially because it's pretty cool, then you get bored it when you realise playing with angry randos is no fun. It's not that a younger generation prefers online multiplayer, it's that they haven't got sick of it yet!

[–] AnyProgressIsGood@lemmy.world -2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I don't get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much

[–] icecreamtaco@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

People don't get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives

[–] Buelldozer 1 points 2 months ago

The game may be old but that doesn't mean a particular person has played it before.