[hoopism]

This. I also enjoy video games and often read up on trends and news... unfortunately I have little to no time to really meaningfully play them. I enjoy watching people who have gotten really masterful play the games I have read about. Not unlike sports.

I also watch things like the Games Done Quick marathons. Those are mostly people who have dedicated themselves to a few games and are mostly interested in completing them in insanely short periods of time. People often spend years dedicating time to shaving off minutes... I would never do that... but I am glad someone does.

[ryandrake]

Yea I love games and used to play a lot, but they have become a huge time commitment. It’s usually one or more of:

1. Games that simply require grinding to unlock game progression (XP, time-based gates, etc.)

2. Games with numerous hour-long quests that need to be done serially in order to progress

3. Games that disproportionately reward outlier-level skill, requiring a huge practice time commitment (multiplayer shooters)

4. Games that reward deep knowledge of rules and formulas, requiring extensive study and sometimes Excel modeling (Eve Online comes to mind, but also the Civilization series and some sandbox games)

These days if you want something fun you can play for 15-30 minutes and still get good at on that schedule, you’re limited to the bland “Casual Gaming” genre.

[alexgmcm]

These days? Hasn't that always been the case? It's just that when we were kids etc. we had more free time.

The Nintendo Switch has an excellent selection of more 'casual' games. Super Mario Odyssey reminded me a lot of the games I played as a kid.

[cybwraith]

I would say not really. For one thing, the early days of gaming held onto many elements from arcades where games were meant to be consumed in somewhat bite-sized chunks (Atari, NES, etc).

A big factor for multiplayer games is the somewhat modern obsession with matchmaking and character intro/pick screens. When I was a kid, I could hop into a game immediately for a 15-20 minute deathmatch session of Quake 1/2/3 in any semi-populated server then leave whenever it was time to do homework, etc.

Last I tried Quake Champions, the newest installment in the series, you spend roughly 1-5 minutes in a matchmaking queue then another 2-3 minutes (or more, it was pretty bad sometimes) in some intro/loading screens, then another minute or two in a pre-match warm-up. So even in the same genre's case you're already potentially 8+ minutes sunk into your 15-20 minute 'quick game' period.

To make matters worse (again because of matchmaking) you are penalized if you have to leave before the completion of a match or if you go idle. Usually this penalty is applied as a low-priority queue the next time you try to matchmake which just compounds the problem from above.

[ryandrake]

> Quake Chanpions

Don’t forget the 2-3 minutes it seems to take to even load the game. QC would be so much better if you could just load it (quickly) hop onto an already-playing game, and skip all the intros and statistics. How did a franchise like Quake backslide so badly?

[retsibsi]

I think the developer/publisher are just responding to market pressures.

Quake Live (at least for its first few years) was relatively pure and old-school, including in the ways mentioned in this thread, but it was only moderately popular and didn't seem to do well financially. The most (financially) successful modern games tend to focus a lot on extrinsic motivations to play -- including character progression, unlockables, gambling crates etc., but also things that give extra context to individual matches, like statistics and ranking points -- rather than just the core gameplay. People also have less tolerance for being the newbie who loses 100-0, and expect to be matched against players around their level.

Not all of these things are relevant to your question, but some of them help to explain the trend toward lobbies, matchmaking queues, and other obstacles to just clicking on a server list and jumping into a game.