As the game predates Steam, I have absolutely no clue how many hours I played of BG1. But I did play it through, and I did play BG2 and BG3. Baldur‘s Gate 3 I played for 340 hours, and in my opinion, it is the best game of the series. I‘ll play more BG3 before I‘d come back to BG1 or 2. But the Baldur‘s Gate series is special insofar as there is this huge gap of nearly a quarter of a century between 2 and 3. Even with the enhanced editions, the technological advantage of BG3 over the previous games is huge, and the design philosophy of computer roleplaying games has also evolved in that timeframe.

Technological advancement of PC games has slowed down. A game of 2026 isn‘t necessarily much more advanced than a game from a few years ago. And game series other than Baldur‘s Gate with more sequels than 3 and shorter time between sequels have a bit of a problem: The latest sequel isn‘t necessarily considered by everybody as the best in the series. As a consequence for example right now there are more people playing Civilization 6 than Civilization 7, and more people playing Europa Universalis IV than EU5.

If you look at the currently most played games on Steam, a lot of the games in the top 50 are older games. Newer games of the same series or at least the same genre exist, but players prefer the older games. The top 3 games are Counter-Strike 2, PUBG:Battlegrounds, and Dota 2. And people busy playing older games simply often don‘t have enough time to also play all the latest games, and so they don‘t buy them.

On the one side one can argue that making every game better than all previous games is an impossible task. On the other side we all know lots of examples where a new game feels like a beta test, being full of bugs and/or balance issues. I stopped playing EU5 because every patch is still messing very much with the game systems and that often has unforeseen consequences. I can see how other people would prefer a stable and established EU4 to this mess.

The „live service“ genre of games is most affected by this, and it is rare that a new live service game can gather critical mass and survive, while people are still happily playing much older games. But while things are less visible for single-player games, Steam player counts do at least suggest that sales of newer games must be down, seeing how many people are busy playing older games of the same genre. And game companies increasingly release remakes and remasters of older games, to make at least some money from all these people preferring the older games.

I don‘t think that the games of next year can beat last year‘s game just on prettier graphics. At some point graphics are „good enough“ and stop being a major criterion when buying a new game. But while good new games are still being made and have success, these all work with original content rather than using better technology. In a world where you can‘t watch the news without hearing the word „AI“, the progress being made on video game AI providing more realistic opponents or NPCs is practically non-existent. Many of the top-selling games of 2026 could have been made a decade ago, they don‘t use any technological progress at all. And unless that changes, older games will continue to occupy a large space in this attention economy, making life difficult for new games.