Greentext

The gaming industry is fine. It's all the AAA publishers that are shit.

The ruin of modern games is the perfect shit storm of:

• The quest for the other side of the uncanny valley, making releases closer to decades
• The death of the in-house game engine.
• The half-baked attempt to cross-platform consoles with PCs
• The half-baked attempt to cross-platform mobile devices with consoles
• The merger of Live Service Games and Free to Play
• Game prices not following inflation.
• Everyone and their brother trying to take a major cut.

Shit is more complex and resource intensive than it has ever been, we're hardly even looking to optimize these days if it works.

You get to choose from a couple of engines, who want a serious cut, or a free engine who has serious problems on consoles.

You need the game not only to pay for itself in sales, but in in-game sales without making it to gambley or making it too pay to win.

Adjusted for inflation, Mario Odyssey is $20 less at launch than E.T. was at launch for the atari.

The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every "generation" after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.

When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.

I'm fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn't mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn't matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.

Most definitely can be refuted. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of amazing games out there made by young and old people that appeal to both young and old people. The issue Anon is struggling with is non gamer capitalists running game companies and milking games for every last penny at the cost of quality.

I know it's a tired example, but look at the company and team responsible for BG3. A game that is widely considered one of the greatest games to be realsed in at least the last 10 years, maybe even longer. This game was made by a company owned and operated by old people and young people. The teams directing, designing, creating, and writing this game were made up of multiple generations of people, and what was made, unimpacted by corporate greed, was a masterpiece.

Good games are products of passion and creative freedom, not money or age.

It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.

There's plenty of great games these days. The "golden age" wasn't because of the quality of games. It was because I was able to delve into them deeply and enjoy them without all the concerns of my adult life running on the back of my mind pulling me out of it.

Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.

It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you're incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don't factor in as much for them.

Just like game design, it's an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).

The golden age of games, also happened to have publishers who were just that, publishers, not slave drivers commanding the market and shutting down studios every time they sneezed.

Obligatory:

No war but class war.

STOP blaming age groups! It’s a divide and conquer tactic. It’s not your parent’s fault. It’s not your grandparent’s fault. It is the fault of the rising Oligarchy Super Wealthy. Their system works when we work against each other. We’re even suspicious and blame our parents and grandparents these days. WTF??

Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there's probably like 15 games that fit this category.

Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they're going to get fucked. Its really simple.

• Hollow Knight (Silksong soon^TM^)
• Stardew Valley
• Factorio
• Outer Wilds
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Clair Obscur

Gaming is fucking phenomenal right now, OP is looking in the wrong direction.

Golden age of gaming is now, though. We get so many bangers basically for free it's insane

The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.

Nah, not really, it's only shit if you only play AAA suit-driven slop. There's a ton of awesome games being released and the older ones are still there to (re) play.

Yeah, oh no a bunch of people got into an industry that they loved so much they got underpaid and lowered the value of their labour to be treated worse.
But then a bunch of them realized they could just use their passion to make something themself and get paid for it and now we are having a hard time justifying why the big industry's "shovels" are special.

It is a shame this happening to lots of industries right now for lots of other reasons too. With the big industry now trying to justify it as being cheaper to make because they automated all the people that make the product especially better.

Indie gaming is the best it's ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.

That has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. They basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.

Gaming hasn't gone to shit.

Some of it is shit, but that's true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.

Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn't align with reality.

Indie games are where it's at.

Big companies like Bethesda and EA are still run by fucking boomers and gen xers. The millennials and younger that work for them end up working on one game, and then they get fired after management fucks everything up.

It's the system slowly and successfully corroding your class conscience, they're taking away your awareness of it so you fight sideways instead of fighting the people above you

It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.

Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.

Frank Zappa ideas; paraphrased by me.

In the 1960's the music execs like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and had no idea what the kids wanted. They just threw money at the problem and gave contracts to anyone. The result was a vast variety, everything from Sha-Na-Na to the Mamas and the Papas to Iron Butterfly. When the next generation of bosses got hired, they looked at the one consistent moneymaker; Motown Records. Everyone at Motown had a similar look and singing style...

I mean, kind of, but not really.

It all started with Halo. Back in the late 90s and early 00s the movie industry was the big money maker of entertainment and there was actually a lot of anti-gaming rhetoric in news and politics. The weekend Halo 3 released it was so popular that it disrupted the box office numbers for a couple of movies. The movie executives decided to stop trying to kill the gaming industry and take it over instead.

So I guess you can blame millennials for playing Halo instead of going to the movies that weekend.

I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.

Zoomer consumers accepting micro transactions in games

Mobile and fast broadband internet is what ruined gaming. Back in the day, it was impossible to download a game very reliably plus it was super slow if you tried. It was far easier to go to a store and buy the disks.

Mobile showed that there is an enormous crowd of extremely stupid people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at adolescent half baked code and that the best retention and monetization is often with junk that is never fixed or is even broken worse over time. That standardized garbage and flooded the space with loads of slop. Just sorting through the slop is a chore now and fools have proven that it is profitable to take a giant shit of slop and dump it on everyone to let people pay their way through searching for undigested corn kernels in these places. The same is true of streaming. You pay for it to waste your time. You lower your expectations, and the cycle continues. It is profitable to target the stupidest people. Culturally, it will require the majority to stop being brain dead zombies, but good luck with that. We're both zombies on an idiot brick right now.

As a millienial software dev:

Imo: What happened is twofold:

1. The business grads also played games, and saw the money to be made.
2. The best devs are smart enough to *not work in AAA Gamedev.