Nope. Gaming has more to offer more than ever. You're just cynical.
Agreed. Been gaming since the mid 80s and have never enjoyed it more. More great games than ever between three successful consoles, PC gaming thriving and a huge indie scene that fills the gaps in the mainstream/AAA market.
There’s a lot of crap, but there always was (think of all the licensed shovelware back in the day). Doesn’t matter if it’s games, movies, books or whatever it is always going to take some shorting the wheat from the chaff to get the most out of it.
And that’s even easier than every before as well with review aggregators to give a quick snapshot of critical takes on things, shit tons of YouTube videos to get a sense of gameplay, lots of games having demos, things like Gamepass making it easy to try a lot of games for low cost etc.
IMO if anyone thinks gaming is going down hill and can’t find things they like they either aren’t trying hard enough, have niche tastes that AAA games don’t cater too AND only enjoy things with AAA level production values or are just not into games anymore (or at least currently). Games require a lot more energy and time than other hobbies so many people just get to a point of life where they aren’t much fun anymore.
For me that happened in the middle of the PS2/Xbox/GCN generation. Had them all, but could barely be bothered to play for a few years as I just had too much going on with life, work, grad school etc. and didn’t have the mental energy for it. Looking back there were a ton of great games that generation, I just wasn’t in place for the hobby. Got back into gaming with the 360 and the past two generations have arguably been my favorite as there’s such great variety in gaming.
The only thing I think has gone down hill is gamer culture. Forums etc. are pretty terrible compared to their heyday. Things got all politicized with Gamergate, then the 2016 US election (and similar things in other countries) politicized everything and all that SJW vs. the otherside crap makes most places miserable. Fanboy/console warring nonsense is the worst its ever been as well—or at least the signal to noise ratio is worse as it seems a lot of the casual, positive chatting about games left forums and moved to Discord, Reddit or other places I don’t frequent.
That said, GAF is still a pretty fun place, just have to avoid certain types of threads and throw repetitive console warriors on ignore. Would be great if there was some community of folks that owned all platforms and only allowed discussion of games and not sales, performance comparisons and other crap. But I’ve been on game forums since the 90s and never found that. Closest thing was when forums had more traffic and some good ones had console-specified sub forums and didn’t allow any of the warring crap or discussion of other platforms period with in them. Forums just don’t have enough traffic to chop up discussion into that many subforums these days as seen by the slow traffic on places like Blu-ray.com’s gaming forums or the IGN boards etc.
