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 FortniteThat is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Turns out that people like playing games that respect their time and aren’t a glorified second job. Who knew.
that respect their time
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
I have hundreds of games on steam.
I mostly play minecraft.
Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.
I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
I die too fast in Noita to get too deep into it… I liked what I played of it though. Something about Starbound made it feel like Temu Terraria… I can’t put my finger on why it feels so … fake? Like physics or the way the player model moves and interacts with blocks is off or something. Maybe it is just too close to Terraria and the many hours I spent in Terraria makes anything close feel off.
I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I’ll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft… Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won’t touch minecraft.
