Popularity of Gaming
In our times, games are released onto the torrent tracks within days of official releases. Versatile1 and I thought about this and had a debate. What would happen to popular games in a few years? Will seeding die down to 1 or 2 hardcore people looking for a few ratio points? Or will it continue?
V1’s approach to the matter was: If you want it, get it a few months after torrential release. (WE DON’T ADVOCATE THIS, THIS IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL). Of course, this is a bit silly, as torrents (which are viewed publicly) show that games from even 10 years ago are still “popular” as ever!
Thinking about this, it was logical to assume that seeding on games would die out sometime. But the real question was, when would this happen?
So we came up with a new theory. For console gaming, seeding dies out within years for most games, quicker for less popular games. But for pc gaming, only fad games and low popularity games lose seeds fast. No one wants to seed what won’t be downloaded. For popular games and hot games, seeds will be available for years to come.
Why is this? Is console game less popular than pc gaming? Personally, I don’t think so. The universality of the pc makes it able to compete with the game consoles.
Consoles, on one hand, are popular when they first come out. Lots of hype, ads, lines at stores. As time goes on, it is commonplace to have some sort of console because of the mob mentality, but the name of the console becomes just a name. The next gen consoles start to overshadow the old ones. Take a look at the Wii, Xbox 360, and the PS3.
While the next-gen consoles replace the older ones, game support for the older consoles disappears. Thus, seeds start to disappear and people move onto the new bandwagon. Add onto this the fact that so many console games come out and seeds die fast anyway, finding things for old consoles becomes hard.
Meanwhile, pc games are universally tied to an operating system. That means new games are linked to hardware which can easily be replaced at low costs. Many games work on multiple OSes as well. When a new console comes out, some games might not be compatible.
Thus why our theory seems to stand. What do you think?
Post your word!
Voltaire.
Posted on August 21, 2008, in Fun, Gaming and tagged computer, console, games, gen, next, old, PC, popular, torrent, video. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Welcome to the Underground. 
Usually the less popular games either die out completely or live on 3rd party sites like rapishare. Otherwise, the most likely place to check for them is probably on IRC due to distro bots.
Although this is a very sound theory, do you have anything to say about rom sites, particularly those of the old gen and new gen (NES, genesis, NDS), because these kind of sites recieve plenty of traffic and practically house every single game created.
Torrents are just one of the many methods of obtaining data.
That is true, we forgot about those sites.
Many people believe that old systems had some of the best games out there and miss old favorites and classics. That’s possibly why those sites get a lot of hits too, and they have lots of server load, so hosting files isn’t a problem for them. This is partially why we didn’t think of them because torrents depends on seeds while these sites are independent.