What happened in 2014? That Malaysian Flight 370 vanished without trace, leading to one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time. The European Space Agency landed a probe on a comet and the Germans won the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil (ha, not this time boys, not this time). Oh, and the Binding of Isaac Rebirth was released.
12 years ago. Do you think that 12 years ago, the developers would be saying to themselves, “I bet this game has over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam in 2026. Unlikely, but that is what is currently happening, and it all seems to be because the game has a 90% discount in the current Steam Sale.”
There are a million games on Steam currently with deep discounts like that, granted pretty much a million games are not as good as The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, but the number is still phenomenal. Yes the game is less than two dollars currently, but how did seemingly an entire generation of gamers miss it the first time around, or not picked it up on sale at any point over the last decade if they were interested?
There’s been a huge success story for this kind of indie game over the past year or so – Mewgenics, Hollow Knight: Silksong and countless others my sponge brain has forgotten.The world, or at least some of it, seems to be getting fed up of all the drama around AAA games and their studios. Huge profits and mass layoffs making gaming seem somehow a lot less fun, but this unique success story perhaps reminds us that gaming is about enjoying ourselves.
For many of us, myself included, there is simply nothing better than sitting down and playing a really captivating video game. The constant drive to get you to spend on microtransactions, the toxic nonsense in lobbies, the being shot in the face by a banana. This is not what it used to be, and maybe, people are beginning to realise that. Maybe it’s time for the big companies to actually wake up and look at what people want to play.
Authored by
Paul McNally
Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, PlayStation Pro, Amiga Action, Mega Action, ST Action, GQ, Loaded, and the The Mirror. He has also hosted panels at retro-gaming conventions and can regularly be found guesting on gaming podcasts and Twitch shows. Believing that the reader deserves actually to enjoy what they are reading is a big part of Paul’s ethos when it comes to gaming journalism, elevating the sites he works on above the norm.
