Holy hell at the 30-40 and 40-50 range of votes completely decimating 20-30.
I'll be 29 this year. State of gaming? I'm in-between.
PC gaming has never been better. Nowadays usually great performance, great visuals, PCs outdoing consoles for AAA consistently visually.
It's great we finally have RT, TAA and modern upscaling techniques honestly. Aside from tessellation and SSR, HBAO+ and skin subsurface scattering, visual technologies kinda stagnated since 2013. We finally have proper lighting, proper shadowing and proper reflections. We still need to work on those GPUS particles, fluid smoke and water simulations and physics.
For older games, DgVodoo, DXVK and more recently, VKD3D have been boon for compatibility, perfect rendering and increased performance.
Mesa's Zink has been ported to Windows recently and it vastly improved OpenGL performance for AMD. Possibly for Intel and Nvidia too.
Linux gaming has more or less become a reality in 2022, due to Valve's involvement.
Emulators are better than ever. PS1, GameCube, Wii, PS2, PS3 emulators are VERY mature. N64 is getting there. Xenia for X360 and XEMU for OG Xbox are making nice progress. Recently even Vita seems to be making strides. Switch has 2 healthy emulators. CEMU is kinda developing at a glacial pace for general 3rd party releases, though Nintendo Exclusives run great. Mostly all of them are running Vulkan, with some of them still clinging to OpenGL or in Xenia's case, DX12 for now.
As for the actual official games releasing, AAA development has slowed down to a crawl. Pandemic + long dev times. Games still kinda limited to cross-gen titles, thought that seems to finally start to end with 2023.
Prices to 70$/€ are asanine. We also need less open world games and more focused experiences. We need more properly directed, linear expériences.
We also need:
A new Splinter Cell
A new 3D Rayman
A new Darksiders
A new Devil May Cry
A new Deus Ex
A new Prince of Persia
A new Sly Cooper
A new Legacy of Kain?
More Half-Life / Metro / STALKER like games
Better superhero games IMO in the vein of the Arkham games.