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Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there's no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn't worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn't any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
Hah! And here I am at a company where everyone does premature optimisations, that end up killing performance because they make the actually needed performance optimisations impossible without major refactoring.
He's actually talked about that other extreme, though I don't recall which video. Sometimes it will be ultra optimizing something that ends up entirely cut, or optimizing it to the point where it's inflexible.