Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for [email protected] (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
Man, this is nearly every mainstream game for me: Fortnite, Minecraft, RDR, GTA, God of War (2018), Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Valve’s The Orange Box, Insomnia’s Spiderman, any From Software game except maybe Bloodborne, and I could keep going.
And I’m not saying any of these games are bad, they just never grab me enough to want to beat them or play them for extended periods, so I concluded they’re not for me.
If it’s not for the immense joy I get out of Japanese action games, fighting games, and shmups, I’d probably not touch video games at all.
I don’t have a term for it but it sounds like you fall into a specific group of gamers. They enjoy gaming but they thrive on the difficulty curve. The curve is the draw no matter what it’s wrapped in.
Fighting games, easy to pick up, unbelievably hard to master.
Shmups: easy to pick up but unbelievably hard to master.
Certain rage games like Bennet Fodey or the Trials series or musical games like DDR which, again, have a crazy difficulty curve.
I’m in the same boat although I do enjoy the other games. They just aren’t nearly as good as people hype them up to be if not outright bad. In my experience, it is entirely the difficulty curve that drives our obsessions with these types of games.
So it’s about the skill ceiling, or just the shape of the difficulty curve, or…? I definitely don’t fall into that group, so I’m curious.