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References this site: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/media-formats/holding-on-to-physical-media-a3747629925/
Actual data here: https://article.images.consumerreports.org/image/upload/v1718112414/prod/content/dam/surveys/Consumer_Reports_AES_May_2024.pdf
Actual question references “Classic videogame systems that came out before 2000, like the NES or GameBoy” and “used at home in the past year” of which 14% responded yes out of a group of 2022 surveyed in North America (demographic details available in link).
Does it in anyway phrase the question to reference real hardware or original versions?
I feel like a lot of people emulate (including using Nintendo Switch Online) or play modernized remixes of titles like Super Mario 99
Full text is ‘Below are some types of visual media that some might consider old or outdated. Which, if any, have you used in the past year?’ and that is an item on the list, it’s not an incredibly detailed survey.
I will say from the rest of the survey responses, the demographics they’ve selected seem to lean more technically competent and security focused than I’d expect.
I wonder how many people “still” drive cars “released” before 2000?
Game consoles are solid-state and tend to not wear out like cars.
That said, my car is from 2003.
Come on, Call of Duty is not that old! /s
The problem is people keep buying new versions of the same games released around 2000.
Playing retro games from my Steam Deck
Playing FF7 on my Steam Deck with the old school PS1 loading screen chefs kiss
Games don’t exist beyond the 1980-1999 filter on Gog, tbh.
Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it’s not fun. How old are the board and card games again?
Hell, chess is huge right now, and it’s over 1500 years old.
Don’t forget Backgammon. World’s oldest board game!
Is it older than the Royal Game of Ur?
And some people play poker, or even chess. What can you do, people like old stuff.
Given that nowhere in the article does it say that 14% of people exclusively play on pre-2000 hardware I don’t find this that surprising.
I’m more shocked by the last statistic, 11% of American households still use fax. Fax? Fuckin’ why? That’s like saying people still listen to music on Edison cylinders.
Fax is commonly used at least in the US because it has regulatory recognition as a secure means of transferring information, it’s highly interoperable, and it doesn’t really have a successor that has caused the network effect to die out entirely.
11% seems slightly higher than I’d expect, but not crazy. Contracts, medical records, interactions with the government are all good reasons to need to send or receive one occasionally. That about 1 in 10 households did last year? Makes some sense.
Seems crazy to me. I can’t imagine that 1 in 10 household even have fax machines. All the stuff you mention is business and medical stuff. Nobody faxes in their medical requests from home.
Except for maybe people who have terrible health problems or those who care for them
Nah. They might do it from work or maybe by email gateway.
Hell it’s only even possible for the 27% of homes that still have a landline. There’s just no way.
There are a lot of people with old technology in their home that still gets used. Fax is still needed for lots of medical things, and not everyone has an office to go to.
Think retired people taking care of sick family members.
Nah. It’s got a big fat [citation needed] from me.
10% of people? Sure I’d believe that 10 % of people have transferred data using fax technology at least once in the past year or something. But 10% of households, and you can’t count email to-fax gateways?
No way.
Signatures as a form of authorization I think held up the facsimile tech way past it’s best by date
I give my fax number to anything that asks me for a phone number. It’s a valid number that can’t recieve calls, meaning when my number is inevitably leaked/purchased by telemarketers, scammers, etc. I don’t even notice.
According to American Dad! widespread continued use would have gotten us the blorfer.
GBC almost exclusively these days, I just can’t devote the time to things like Morrowind anymore as much as I want to. I do want to hack my OG Xbox and run Voodoo Vince, Psychonauts, and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy again, but then that only brings me up to like 2003.
Without piracy and the industry wanting to move digital only we are doomed.
Keyword: “without”.
I like old and new. I love my retro emulators (which I put a lot of effort into setting up just right; and I’d love some original hardware if I could afford it). I also love my PS5.
None of my game consoles are younger than 2000. I can’t deal with PC gaming, I hate subscription models, and refuse to download “games” to my phone.
“Still” is really not the way to phrase it.
A good chunk of the people playing on retro systems never even owned half the systems back in the day which they have collected now. Or they might be new people getting into the hobby who perhaps weren’t even born when those systems were current.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
It’s such a strange way of looking at a hobby which is more popular now than it ever was.
Being able to actually play neo Geo games would make young me so envious Also the full arcade version of games with a button for “insert coin”.
Yeah, the Neo Geo really is that console that was an outrageous luxury back in the day.
There is an arcade near me which is flat fee for entry and every machine is on free-play. It’s very satisfying to be able to keep pressing continue as much as you like.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
An individual cannot but a group of people can.
“Children are still fascinated by sticks” is as true as always, even though the individual children have mostly grown up, grown old, and died.
Of course. And that’s because “still” has two meanings. One being “the same now as always” and the other being “in a continuing state, uninterrupted”
Which one the reader will interpret is dependent on context.
“75% of children still fascinated by sticks” is very likely to mean different groups of children surveyed years apart - the ‘unchanged’ meaning.
“14% of adults over 50 still keep a pair of 80s flared jeans in their wardrobe” is very likely to mean it is the same adults who were wearing them back in the 80s - the ‘uninterrupted’ meaning.
The problem is that for this article, neither of those valid meanings make sense - at least not to me.
It is not ‘uninterrupted’ because we know that lots of people stopped playing old systems, while other people joined the hobby.
It is also not ‘unchanged’, because the levels of people playing 90s consoles will have dipped to a low somewhere in the middle and then bounced back thanks to renewed interest and modern hobbyist technologies that make these things more accessible now than they were just 10 years ago.
It’s altogether a different situation now than it was then, and that’s why I find “still” to be a poor choice of phrase regardless of the meaning intended.
It’s true and I love the newcomers. But my NES and N64 were both purchased at release and are still one-owner. And used regularly. I also have a 4070ti but I love those old systems.
Famicom owner checking in.
The PS1, N64, Saturn, and the Dreamcast are pre 2000 systems.
