Everyone has a different definition of "retro".

I tend to view it on a basis of time and feelings of nostalgia. Typically this occurs after 20-25 years. So 7th gen consoles would be very shortly falling into that category.

I am hearing of a few people regretting giving up their PS3s and wanting to buy another. Xbox 360s have a slightly less strong following despite being a tad older. Wii's have a problem with being very hard to maintain in the absence of the store working, and seem to get a soft corruption thing which required a factory only fix, so IDK if they are viable as an owner maintained platform unless they were already converted to wiibrew some years back. Not that I am very up to date on the modding scene so could be wrong. So of course all I've got is some junky 360 and wii parts machines when PS3 looks like taking off 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-01, 18:47:

I am hearing of a few people regretting giving up their PS3s and wanting to buy another. Xbox 360s have a slightly less strong following despite being a tad older.

I think one of the reasons why people still want a PS3 is that Sony's newer consoles don't support PS3 games via backward compatibility.

On the other hand, you can play a good chunk of Xbox360 titles on newer Xbox consoles. And a decent amount of original Xbox games work on newer systems as well.

I don't think tying to an arbitrary amount of years is fundamentally wrong. It's a mix of certain. They were released 18-19 years ago which is a long time, but they were only officially discontinued 8 years ago. The stores are about to shut down for both (the Xbox Marketplace shuts down in a couple of months, and Sony already wanted to shut down the PS Store 2 years ago, so I expect them to follow MS soon). For certain games DLCs or even patches are already unavailable. On the personal side, after a certain age, generally between 30 and 40, people starts getting nostalgic about their childhood and college years and a game system that was released 18 years ago and was active up until about 10 years ago they could serve someone from the beginning of high school to the end of college. And they are in their mid-30s today which is the perfect time for that nostalgia to kick in.

The only thing I think that keeps people from calling them retro (besides elitism/gate keeping) is the high availability and low prices.

Like Randomstranger says, the age of the 7th gen consoles are perfectly placed for people who grew up with those to be nostalgic for them again. Commercial timings around start/stop dates, are becoming less relevant. I will say that I am buying up PS3 and PS4 for rock bottom prices right now cause not many people want them.

I will say that gaming is changing. From the 7th gen onwards, I feel the type of games in the AAA space are a lot more homogeneous and cross generation games are a thing now. The differences between the type of games from 7th to 9th gen is a lot narrower when comparing to other generations.

There is no such thing really, it’s just whatever you want to collect and play. I used to buy up nes games like crazy while the snes was still around. Same with other slightly older games and hardware at the time. I wouldn’t have called it retro and I think calling things retro is a very modern kind of labeling that ultimately isn’t important and doesn’t really provide us with anything useful.

when they start to lose their place on the store shelves.

leileilol wrote on 2024-03-02, 02:55:

when they start to lose their place on the store shelves.

+1

For me, like so many things in life, it's all about perspective.

I grew up in the 70's/80's, but consider 90's and earlier "retro".

My kids look back on the XBox, PS2, and Game Cube as "retro".

So I don't think of "retro" as a fixed time frame, but what people remember from their life as they get older. It always bugs me a little when someone says "that's not retro" when someone else is feeling nostalgic. It's different for everyone, and will continue to change as time goes on.

That's my 2 cents anyway. 😜

When it feels markedly different than the crap peddled today, so the WiiStation 360 - which "on average" introduced always-online elements, installations, updates, and "micro"transactions but were for the most part avoidable/non-ubiquitous - are borderline into this category for me 😀

Same with PCs really: C2D is slow but still usable mainly because, apart from maybe the 20th and higher optional extension to the 8086, there haven't been any HUGE changes and 8 GB is still enough (thanks modern 4GB netbooks), Pentium 3 and older are markedly different from those, while P4 (or rather its competitor) did introduce amd64 but at the time it was irrelevant and/or counterproductive for most (XP, its drivers, and extra RAM) and in general they're only good as resistive heating 😉