I think games generally are improving, but AAA games mostly feel stagnant. It’s easy to look back at the best games of previous years, but gloss over the sea of low-effort licensed games and failed experiments. Games are more expensive than ever to make now, and that means there’s too much money involved to take big risks and gamble on experimental stuff. Big games by big publishers are forced to play it safe. The average experience has improved if you just picked a random game off the shelf 20 years ago vs now, but you don’t get as many of those spiked high points either.

Indie games are better than ever though. It’s so much easier now for indie devs to create and share games with the public, and that risk-taking mentality is still strong. The price creep of AAA games isn’t a thing, no season passes or battle passes or microtransactions, just games made by passionate players who wanted to scratch a certain itch missing in the market like you say.

They absolutely are getting better audio&video fidelity, but that doesn’t mean much to, at least me, if the music is less memorable, the bugs are all patched, everything is over-monetized games as a service, all the assets are generic, and it’s all hyper-derivative remakes of remakes. I get that “fun is fun”, but once you’ve played so many games, you look back at games from 2001 and wonder why the only innovations we have are mantling, $20 hats, and Microsoft is buying everything.

I think this is a bit reductive of the current landscape. It really only feels true if you limit your samples to AAA games, which have always been focused on low risk and high profitability. I would argue that the industry as a whole has become much healthier in the 8th and 9th console generations than it was during the 7th console generation.

Here is my argument:

During the 7th console generation, the industry was experiencing explosive growth. Video game budgets ballooned rapidly as the new hardware demanded higher quality assets and developers needed to pump out bigger, more polished games to compete in the market. Small budget games became a rarity, often relegated to handhelds if they got made at all. Big publishers weren’t all that interested, and you needed their help if you wanted to get your game certified, marketed, and distributed at retail.

The growth of digital distribution changed all that. Platforms like Steam, and later the loosened requirements to sell games on PSN and Xbox Live, lowered the barrier to entry considerably. Over the last 10 years, indie games have exploded in quality, quantity, and popularity. And we’re even seeing the return of mid budget “AA” games. There is plenty of innovation and excitement going on in this space.

I would also argue that the rise of F2P for multiplayer games is a net positive, when done right (i.e. no P2W, cosmetic-only purchases), but that can be a more contentious opinion.

I come across so many unique games on Steam, but so many have fewer than 100 reviews - I really don’t think the problem is that companies aren’t taking risks, but that players aren’t.

I’m no gamedev, but as a consumer, my impression is that this itch happens because of where the person asked usually looks to.

The way I see it, games, much like all other segments of entertainment, can be divided into big productions and smaller productions.

Those productions are usually accompanied by proportionally big or small companies.

From what I can observe, bigger companies get where they are because they made something no one expected but that worked great. But then, a paradox forms, they get so big that perhaps they’re too afraid too fail. After all, the higher you get, the higher you fall. And so, in fear of failing, instead of daring, and thus being innovative, they stick to the same formula that got them where they are, over and over, trying to keep momentum. This lack of innovation, added with the tactic of selling hype instead of actual contents, feels extremely wearing.

Meanwhile, the smaller companies don’t have this leash that is being too big and needing to keep momentum, meaning they have more room to dare being different.

Surely, there are many indie projects that leave to be desired, but the impression I get is that the amount of indie games that get good reception, as well as how good this reception is, usually end up being of a much higher order than those shiny AAA games that are made to sell consoles.

And with those points in mind, I go back to the first phrase of those considerations of mine by pondering if perhaps the people you asked to aren’t biased by seeing/consuming too much of those games whose companies are trying to maintain the status quo.

Now, what was my favorite console generation, you ask? None. But I do have one console that I love far more than the others, the PlayStation Vita.

“How heinous!” / “This console has no exclusives!” / “It launched dead!”

This is no joke and I’ll explain why.

Starting with the SNES up until recently, I was always 1~2 generations behind everyone else, so I could see very well how the landscape for gaming on a given console was after the dust settled in.

The SNES was nice but I didn’t play much of it at the time. The PS2 had great and unique games a la carte (I’m still finding good games to this day tbh). The PS3 started feeling same-y, with too much glitter and too little contents in most games I could find. And the Vita’s catalogue is a salad due to Sony supporting it for some time (long enough to have some bigger IPs in it), indie developers supporting it long after Sony dropped support (even modding in the Vita is mostly just “made a wrapper to run x or y game on the console”), and it supporting by design the PSP and, by extension, the PS1, made it so games could be picked at random without any specific luring you more than the others. And upon picking many games at random, this degradation I described before became more and more palpable.

The Vita is my favorite console because it has no consistency in its catalogue. And this lack of consistency lets me find just so much stuff that is genuinely good. To me, a device blessed by its curse.

So yeah, I think the entertainment industry feels stale because the bigger projects, the ones that are usually seem first, are stale, while the smaller projects can still thrive. But as they say, the first impression is a lasting impression, so if what the person sees first are games that staling in quality, their views on gaming overall may be tainted.