Well, when you say ‘many modern games’ you’re implying that every game sucks currently and in the last few years. Every year there will always be a lot of shitty games but it’d be discrediting to not acknowledge that there are good stuff released every year.

In the past 5 years I will say some of the best games I’ve played that were released were Blue Fire, Inscryption, Flynn: Son of Crimson, Paint The Town Red, Huntdown, Iron Meat to name a bunch.

One major gripe I have with people who complain about modern gaming, are ones who look to AAA gaming development and expecting creativity and innovation. When, they’ve long dried up on that. We’re not in the PS2/X-Box/GameCube/PS3/360/Wii generations anymore where there were tons of that going on with unique games trying all sorts of things.

The modern gaming climate has shifted into what’s trendy, moreso than before. You’ll have open-world games, but virtually samey quests to do over and over. You’ll have RPGs, but offer nothing but different endings with barely any impact and just grind-fests. You’ll have shooter games that care way too much about meaningless stats and other pointless data to keep track of. You’ll have sports games that remain as more vanilla and dry of an experience than they ever been. (Gone are the days where in the 80s, 90s and 00s you had sports games released but tried adding flavor to them like NBA Street or Mutant League Hockey.)

Games that are released but somehow needing patches after said release. Gaming developers and publishers having to come out and issue apology statements over them or some of them just outright not caring. Studios getting shut down because of unreasonable corporate demands. Studios getting shut down because of acquisitions.

Streamers and YouTubers dramatizing games or whoring themselves up for a cheap handful of views and subscriptions. Out of touch with reality and themselves and abusing their influences.

These are what make modern gaming suck.

Pacing. One example:
In GTA Vice City, the first mission was “drive to that place”. The second mission was “beat up that fat guy”. The third mission was “smash those parked cars with a hammer”.
In GTA 5, the tutorial was a bank heist with explosives, automatic weapons, hostages, a shootout with cops, a car chase, and a betrayal by part of your gang. That’s enough story and action for the first 3 acts IMO.

You can’t have this discussion “aside from corporate greed”.

That said, most older games also sucked. It’s Sturgeon’s Law. You just remember the good ones you played for hours and gloss the bad ones you dropped after five minutes or never played because they got 1-star reviews.

I mean, there have always been bad games. There were bad games for the NES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

It’s just that the ones on that list that people remember are the few that someone would still be playing forty years later, the really exceptional ones. Typically, if someone in 2025 is thinking of an older game, they’re thinking about the best of the best from that time period.

I’ve seen arguments that a lot of “the good old days” mindset for many things comes from survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation “proves” causality.

In architecture, for example:

Just as new buildings are being built every day and older structures are constantly torn down, the story of most civil and urban architecture involves a process of constant renewal, renovation, and revolution. Only the most beautiful, useful, and structurally sound buildings survive from one generation to the next. This creates a selection effect where the ugliest and weakest buildings of history have been eradicated (disappearing from public view, leaving the visible impression that all earlier buildings were more beautiful and better built).

My tastes have increasingly narrowed with age as I know what I like most, and the niches I like are pretty detached from what mainstream AAAs chase after. That said, every year I find at least a few new releases that I enjoy. And I don’t think that will ever stop being the case. I ignore the games I don’t care about and play the games I do.

There’s also the fact that I’ve settled into a few games that I really love endlessly grinding, and so it’s hard for other releases to pull my attention away from just playing my favorites some more. I’ve got a backlog of JRPGs, a genre I know I’ve always liked, and yet I hardly make time to finish them anymore…

Modern games dont suck. Modern AAA games that only care about making God look poor suck. The aggressive monetization and season passes suck. Shit, some of the newer games are good games under all that.

Try Caves of Qud, Cassette Beasts, Nuclear Nightmare, Hellpoint, or any myriad of other indie games. They’re just as good as they’ve always been.

Modern games rule. UFO 50, Path of Achra, Balatro, and Halls of Torment are all bangers that came out last year.

Now modern AAA games do suck because they have to make profit and expansion that competes with general index funds from the stock market rather than competing with other video games.

Go check out some of the lower budget weirdo games, you might find something you like.

A similar phenom happened with TV, once there were hundreds of channels people started leaning heavily on nostalgia. I think it just that an overwhelming amount of options makes the whole experience more taxing on executive function and you can’t help but notice the garbage you filter thought because you just have to filter through so much more of it. I guess advertising plays a hand in the levels of exposure too. It’s why it felt like when you were a kid a good game just fell on your lap and now gaming being more visible than ever you still feel like when you find one it’s a hidden gem among coal.

I think if you looked more or in different places you’d find more you like.

I dunno.

I really enjoyed Mouthwashing, Entropy Zero 2, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, and they are quite modern games.

An ever (even exponentially) increasing number of games made since the 1960’s are entirely simulated within “com-pu-ters”, which is far inferior to analogue implementations. They make me motion sick and the 3D first-person view ones are very disorientating to navigate in. It’s also a lot more difficult to modify them, such as tweaking the rules or proxying your own assets/pieces.

I can’t complain though, as there are many incredible analogue games being released today. In fact, we’re in rather a golden age! And 3D printing is great to produce whole games or one’s own miniatures for mere pennies.

Lack of innovation, which has kind of always been a thing. When something does innovate, everybody else starts copying it. From Doom, to Diablo, to Minecraft to GTA.

There’s also just a general lack of feeling to a lot of big budget bullshit. Technically stable, polished gameplay, great aesthetics; but there’s no heart. No passion. Everyone involved was just there for the paycheck. It’s routine. I don’t really know how else to put it, but it’s the difference between art and simply a product.

I disagree with this. I think we are in a game renaissance right now with many great games being released all the time.

What I agree does suck are Triple A games. Why do they suck? Well, they cost a lot of money to make. You need a team of dozens of people working over a long period of time along with lots of marketing. Millions and tens of millions of dollars can easily go into a modern AAA game.

So when you have millions of dollars of investor money behind you- you’re not going to take many risks. You’re going to be as conservative and formulaic as possible so that you can better predict what you will bring in through revenue. This is why there’s a new Call of Duty, FIFA, and Assassin’s Creed every single year. And they’re all virtually the same game with slight changes.

In my opinion if you want to see actual innovation and creativity, you (generally) have to look outside of these types of games. Not even necessarily niche indie games, but smaller scale developers. They don’t have nearly as much overhead and they tend to have passionate individuals with a vision. This gives them more flexibility.

So as a general rule of thumb, you’ll find more ambitious games coming from smaller developers. And with ambition comes both great successes and failures. But the cream rises to the top.

Making a good game isn’t the highest priority anymore.

I’m playing “Stray” right now. I think it’s awesome. (It is from 2022 btw)

Because of the depression epidemic and people can’t enjoy shit anymore

(at least for me, that is)