I think for me it’s retro games, specifically. I used to have been in the used video games market for 5 years from 2008 to 2012. My goal was to construct a personal video game collection, physical copies of games I personally enjoyed growing up.
I was registered on a game trading site which served as the base of my business, I’ve made rounds of thrift store hopping and any used games market I could find locally. I’ve struck amazingly good deals and I might’ve had luck on my side a few times (for example, a guy on that game trading site gave me a free copy of Super Metroid that I got to choose for a minor mistake he felt he needed to honor.)
And I felt like I was incredibly close to completing my personal collection until 2012, I ran into some dumb drama with my sister and ex girlfriend back then. They racked up the cable bill in my name that I was trying to cancel and they wouldn’t let me cancel it until I turned in all equipment. And I was jobless at the time too, having lost my job. So I needed to sell some things and sure enough, had to sacrifice my entire collection at the time that I spent 5 long years building.
I never recovered since and this was during the golden period where it was still fairly fun to collect and everybody wasn’t pretending to be a pawn shop.
I would try continuing what collection of games I’ve tried to build, through Steam but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays, the used video games market has turned into just a platform full of resellers, pawn brokers and stingy greedy collectors.
I find it very cheapening that people treat games like they’re just tools of trade. They mean nothing and they’re treated like nothing except to make a quick buck, however possible.
It’s only worsened thanks to Goodwill and similar thrift stores, getting in on it where everyone pays too much attention as to what the prices go for on EBay and VGPC.
And we have WATA involved that hasn’t made things better. Thanks for shitting on an honest hobby, assholes.
Computer hardware and video games. I got into around 2014 and it felt like a magical time during technical strides, and waves of incredibly powerful hardware coming out year after year. Great games were being released and nobody could wait for what could be possible in just a few years. In 2024 I basically quit. I have vowed to never build another “hot rod” again.
It was a slow realization that this new, faster hardware, was only making AAA devs lazy. I remember just a few years ago most games could be played with 2gb of VRAM. Nowadays you want 8gb, minimum. These new games aren’t much more advanced, or look any better, they have terrible optimization because they can.
That combined with increased monetization and prices for shitty, unfinished games made me realize there’s no value here left anymore. Another major factor is that games are getting longer and longer, just for the sake of occupying your time. As an adult I have much better things to do than grind for a single item, or caring for a virtual plant.
A single game that’s 50 hours long will consume weeks of free time, while being excruciatingly boring for much of it. So much of that time could be used for real life skills, that will improve my life (cooking and woodworking, currently)
I can complete multiple projects in the time it takes to complete a single game. These projects will enrich my life for years afterwards, but time spent on grindy games have only left regrets
I still enjoy the occasional indie game, or games with friends (L4D2 and TF2) but I no longer enjoy most games, and no longer have an ambition to finish my steam library. I am perfectly content with my unplayed games.
Hopefully this makes sense, just wanted to get this nagging feeling out for a while.
I was told in 2009 “Why optimize? Hardware upgrades will make your efforts obsolete anyway.” So… I devoted my time to optimization, because fuck that. I ended up doing algorithm optimization in my first full time job, and loved… That part of the job at least.
Indie games and co-op games are my jam. I feel for all of this comment.