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.
Next year it is going to be even lower with how prices are going. Upgrades are just not feasible anymore.
Glad I got a 9070XT just before everything went bust. I'll be sticking with DDR4 for a few years though.
I'm using 32GB of Corsair DDR4 I got back in 2016. Think I can safely say I got my moneys worth already and still intend to ride it into 2030 at this rate.
Honestly I think DDR4 is the right call for an everyday-use PC anyway. I might be showing my ignorance here, but when I upgraded my PC I got DDR5-6000 and the memory training times are INSANE. The first few times I tried to boot I wound up restarting because 5 mins after hitting the button it still hadn't shown the manufacturer's logo and I assumed it was busted. Once it finally does finish the training, it usually doesn't have to do it again for a while... but sometimes it does! Totally randomly (as far as I can tell), I'll go for a quick reboot, maybe swapping from my Linux install back over to Windows or something, and what should be a 15 second wait is now suddenly a full 5+ minutes.
Near as I can tell, DDR5 Just Does That Sometimes??? How is that an upgrade!? I guess I'm probably seeing some performance gains from the faster timing, but man, sometimes I think I'd trade it in exchange for never having to wait on a black screen for minutes at a time.
Yea you don't really get to choose though, unless you're willing to go with a 2 generations old CPU just to get DDR4. Even the newest generation is over a year old for AMD, the DDR4 compatible stuff is 5 years old now and leaves you no upgrade path.
Mind you, I'm on a Ryzen 3000 series CPU, I could still upgrade to a newer and more coreful AM4 CPU AND get more RAM without having to go DDR5. But anyone building in 2026 probably doesn't want to get a Ryzen 5000 series CPU anymore.
The general trend, yes.
But then again, my computer is now many years old (some components more than others) and I'm pretty sure I could play every release from this year on the highest graphic setting (or at least on "high") without performance issues.
What I'm trying to say is not "my PC is so great" but you you don't actually need a current-Gen, high end PC to play even recent triple-A titles. Eventually it'll get too old, but that is a very long time: probably close to a decade or something, if you individually upgrade some things occasionally.
Like a true patient gamer I didn't play a single game from 2025.
Respect.
Makes sense, most games were released before 2025
New games are expensive and the all those UE5 games run like crap, cause I can't afford high end hardware either. Of course I'll just play old games.
And thanks to AI hardware is getting even more expensive.
I was just about to invest in a high-end PC when the RAM prices started to go crazy. I'll wait it out. My PS5 is gonna make it easier for me to wait.
Wait for a PS6 that Sony will sell at a loss due to earning it back on games and salvage that sweet sweet ram and GPU for a home made PC lol.
I have a gtx 1080. 2025 games are mostly written in unreal 5. Unreal 5 is designed such that not even the highest end gpus can actually run it without framegen. And now also with mandatory raytracing.
Older games still work, and they look and run better for me.
And most U5 games look kinda the same
Fascinatingly, this number can't even include Fortnite, since it's not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It's not all "New releases failing." A lot of it is "Games have a much longer lifespan now."
Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren't old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They're in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They've never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I've also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.
So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.
This is not to say that there hasn't been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You'll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it's all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that's frankly a good and healthy thing. We're seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that's genuinely fantastic news for the medium.
It's weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there's ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn't been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it's incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it's one of the best RPGs you'll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it's one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we're getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter... And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it's inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.
My method of patient gaming is to only buy games that are $10 or less
Just got subnautica, hades 1, disco Elysium, oxygen not included, hollow knight (I’m sad to learn I don’t like platformers that much…), kerbal space program.
Shit, I have so much to play for the next 5 years just there.
Factorio and Hades 2 were my exceptions, got them full price.
I kinda gave up buying new stuff because of all the editions bullshit. Complete, Deluxe, Gold, Ultimate, Season Pass, Whatever The Fuck Else Special Director's Cut - yeah, yo ho ho ho your capitalist ass straight to the fire sell.
Same here, game on sale for $3, but then I see it had $200 in DLC to play the complete game. Major turn off.
Icarus, Conan, hit man 3, etc.
hitman 3 is fucking ridiculous. it's a great game, I love it, but for the love of God just release it in one piece and kill the online mode
Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.
And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.
... Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.
Most permaonline 'hardcore' gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming 'journalists', and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers... they're all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.
This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.
Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.
At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.
People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically 'decade of investment' game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.
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.
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don't.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they're now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don't blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics... while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you're not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
EDIT: 12 polygons you say?
Runs on anything, you say?
... ok, hear me out:
What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is... what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?
Man if there was a game like that, you'd have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.
(This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)
I played like three games from this year. PEAK, MH Wilds, MK World.
The joy of playing older games is that they run well since they‘ve had years of patches and there‘s been years of faster hardware to power through most of the lack of optimization. And they‘re about a quarter the price. For running four times worse, new games also certainly don‘t look four times better.
The gaming industry for new games being released is brutal. The competition is sky high, and all you need to think about are games like Stardew Valley or Skyrim. There are so many options to choose from, a new young gamer has barely any reason to pay full price for any new games. We are entering the "Please play out game! It's free!" phase, and still no one will spend the time. Time and attention are the most valuable thing.
Patient gamer chiming in. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time and loving it. No bugs, a great expansion, and paid $20. For single player games the backlog keeps me a few years behind and the cycle continues.
Which probably only proves that Steam Machines is going to be more than enough for everyone.
I had some financial troubles recently, so I have not been buying any AAA games for over a year but I have bought some new little games here and there like Peak or some free to play games so my new release percentage is 22%
54% is 1 to 7 year old games.
24% is 8 years or older.
Still rocking Elite Dangerous.
Same, 80% of my gaming was on older releases. The only game I played released in 2025 was an indie TD game called Dungeon Warfare III, mostly because I played and loved I and II.
I do buy new games even full price on rare occasion. Regardless of that, there's nothing new games do much better than old games besides graphics and that mattering declined hard once league of legends, counter strike, fortnite, minecraft, roblox, etc became people's childhood to their ongoing adulthood games. I've met people that haven't spent a dime on genshin impact while having played for 5 years
No one is missing out on the best 2025 games if they're playing the best games of 2015. Time is finite and if it's filled with good, what difference does it make if it's new or old. You're not missing out if you're playing the best games of 2000-2014 in 2025.
I follow emulation on Android communities and people love playing the greatest hits of the PS2, Gamecube, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and it seems to mostly be teenagers. And now we're getting good PC emulation support and PS3 and X360 support is progressing. Switch on Android emulation is pretty good now. Android, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Legion Go, Rog Ally, GPD Win, Ayaneo. Even Switch 2. The relatively low power gaming scene is growing and that bodes well for "classic/retro/oldies" gaming.
It's been 12 years since the PS4 launched. Early PS4 games don't play much different than 2025 games. The classics oldie radio station of games are soon going to be very modern. 2007 Bioshock era games are already very modern and look pretty good too
People with massive backlogs: aw yeah, it's all coming together
Wait there are new games coming out still? I thought everyone was just working on their pile of shame.
I mean, Clair Obscur and Silksong both came out this year, and they're fantastic.
But if we're talking triple A stuff? Uh.... Not a clue. I wanna say there was a Battlefield game?
It doesn't help also that new GPUs and now even disk drives and RAMs are ridiculously expensive.
I am sure the end goal of corpos is to turn this into another subscription service.
According to Metacritic, there were only eight 9/10 or better games this year. Or two, if you ignore remakes, remasters, and sequels. Maybe the issue is a drop in quality this year...?
https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/
People don’t buy new games anymore because they often release incomplete. Why would I buy a game that is offering only 25% of its content. I’ll wait for it to be don’t and buy it at a discount in a year. Thanks
Not surprising
I think I bought one game from 2025 this year. Two-Point Museum. Great value. I’ve had a blast with it.
I’ve no idea what AAA releases have come out this year, and I don’t particularly care. They tend to be garbage anyway.
All the new releases were under $20 indie or "AA" games like Microprose published titles.
I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.
There were a lot of great fucking indie games released this year, from the comments a bunch of people here have missed some great indie games.
Hades II, Silksong, Blue Prince, Ball x Pit, Mandragora, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Citizen Sleeper 2, Dispatch, Absolum, Megabonk, Constance, Wheel World, Cloverpit, that's only a fraction of this year's releases and I'm not even counting the more ambitious titles like The Alters and Expedition 33. Indie fans have been eating good for sure.
If they already made all the games we ever need, would they start taking them away just so we have to buy new ones, instead? This is the future of steam when Gabe dies.
There were games released this year? Neat. I'll probably check them out. Right after another round of Tetris.
1% for me and I could not even tell which game(s) because I do not own anything released this year. I'm guessing they count demos/playtest.
I do have 7 2025 games on my wishlist though, but no reason to pull the trigger on any of them before summer/winter sale 2026.
Haven't played a single game from 2025. I don't even think I saw any that caught my eye tbh.
Oh no i lie - World of goo 2 is definitely on my wishlist. Maybe next year though, I'm still busy with Satisfactory at the moment