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I said that in 2001, too. Not the TV, but that games were better.
I mean, the indie/AA scene is incredible. Modding scenes are unreal. There are incredible AAAs like KCD II, and others (like Cyberpunk) that release rough but age like wine. The back catalog is more accessible, and higher fidelity, than ever.
2007/2013 me would be mind-blown. I don’t know what people are on about.
My biggest gripe is that (on average) it sucks to be a small dev right now. Even if your project is good, whether it’s enough to pay rent is a total roll of the dice, and that is partially because so much attention is vacuumed up by trashy AAAs or mobile gambling simulators.
There is a significant shortage of game investment capital at present. You used to be able to grab some industry talent, hit up some venture people, and put something together with a smallish studio and get funded.
AI swallowed up all the investors. When AI finally collapses (assuming there’s an economy anymore), investors will come back to games again. It’s one of the few markets that survives inflation.
I mean, there are a ton of medium-small games being made at present, and quite a few investor groups and publishers that funded them.
I think a more existential issue is that there are so many games, and their slice of attention is diluted by heavily marketed mobile stuff and some AAAs.
…And I guess there is a gap of true ‘medium’ sized studios, in what feels like the efficiency sweet spot. It feels like publishers either go too big or too small.
2000-2007 golden age of pc gaming
change my mind
Given that you can still play most of those games. It feels hard to say the golden age “ended”.
There’s more to play every year.
No I won’t.
It’s all been downhill since the NES came out. Colecovision was the height of the art.
No… pong! Who needs anything else?
happy cake day!
You only have this view if you only play AAA games. The explosion of high quality indie and AA games in the last decade tells a different story. I haven’t bought a AAA game since Cyberpunk came out (and I pre-ordered a year early) if you don’t count Baldurs Gate 3 as one.
My last CoD was the original Modern Warfare, my last Battlefield was Bad Company 2, my last sports game NHL '05 (on the PS2 lol) and I don’t think I missed much.
I am sorry guys, old man here, but 1997 was the best year for gaming:
- Diablo
- Fallout
- Quake II
- Ultima Online
- Ages of Empires
- Final Fantasy 7
- Grand Turismo
- Golden Eye 007
- Starfox 64
- Crash Bandicoot II
- Tomb Raider II
- PaRappa the Rapper
How the hell do you beat that? Most of the games released yearly are sequels to these games.
And 1998 isn’t far behind with:
- Half-Life
- StarCraft
- Baldurs Gate
- Unreal
- Metal Gear Solid
- Resident Evil II
- Ocarina of time
- Soul Calibur
- Spyro
I was actually thinking earlier this week that this year has been insanely good for gaming! We’ve gotten:
- Silksong
- Hades 2
- Alabaster Dawn (by CrossCode developers (my fave game of all time))
- Doom: The Dark Ages
- Death Stranding 2
- Monster Hunter Wilds (This one is controversial but as a long time MonHun fan I genuinely think its the best one yet, performance notwithstanding)
- Ghost of Yotei (soon!)
- Probably a million more amazing games I’m forgetting
Probably a million more amazing games I’m forgetting
These are all a matter of taste, but they’re huge releases:
- Expedition 33
- Borderlands 4
- Civilization VII
- Silent Hill F
Monster-sized list here: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/2025-upcoming-games-release-schedule/1100-6526471/
I think most MonHun fans will agree that Wilds has the best gameplay experience to date. It’s such a damn shame that’s overshadowed by just how genuinely awful the performance is. I want to keep playing it so badly but I just can’t be bothered to do a full computer restart and force close as many programs as possible just to run the game at a mediocre 45-60 fps where everything looks like a slurry of artifacting on a 2070 super and an i7. Ugh…
No one said that in 2007.
Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, The Orange Box (Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Portal), Mass Effect, CoD4:MW, Uncharted, Mario Galaxy, BioShock, Crackdown, The Witcher, Crysis, God of War 2, Metroid Prime 3…
That year was historic.
(But I realize this ruins the joke.)
2007 was about as good as it ever got anyone who says otherwise wasn’t there. COD4 having perks was revolutionary for console shooters, TF2 is still played on PC, Mass Effect is dope as hell, and Halo 3 was the last good Halo game. Until I guess reach idk shooters preference.
1998
Halo 3 by itself, that game owned me and my friends that year
From all the years listed, 2007 is the only one that I would agree was weak, for my taste in games.
And 2013 was peak. It’s absolutely the year I spent more time playing new games, with a monthly average way past 200 hours (300+ by the final quarter).
the latest Acerola video talks about how the modern anti-consumer industry trends (less content, more monetization, more dlc, live service, etc) became a lot more common after 2013 or so, and specifically after the release of Destiny
What’s one of the games you most enjoyed in 2013?
Rune Factory 4.
This if you had hardware and decent internet back then. Otherwise it’s cs 1.6 from 2000.
Also in 2007 many were too hooked on MMOs to notice anything else really.
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IMO we are in a golden age of indie games right now. At one point practically every indie game was a 2D platformer (not that there’s anything wrong with platformers, but that’s all their limited development resources would allow).
Then we had the era of the untextured (or really minimally textured) 3D Unity games with boxy models and really minimal animations.
Now there are so many indie games coming down the pipe (or which are already out) with amazing art assets and really high quality animations, better than a lot of AAA stuff in the 2000s I would even say.
Also, even in the AAA scene we are finally out of the brown era.
Technology has advanced so much that it’s easier everyday for a single developer or a small group to make a game. I think it will only get better. It’s a good time to make things!
Unless you want to get paid for it lol
Well, considering “wanting to get paid” is the reason AAA gaming has gone to utter ass over the course of the last two decades ^(I legit cannot believe that Horse Amor, the first major, cosmetic-only microtransaction, was 2006, spelling the beginning of the end for AAA gaming…)^ I believe that having Indies be dominated by people who are in it for the sake of making something great instead of just getting paid is why they are having a boom in quality products.
Yeah but wouldn’t it be nice if they could pay their bills without having to work another job. Isn’t creating a game worth something?
Would be even nicer if we didn’t have an economy that arbitrarily restricted access to resources based on imaginary tokens of perceived value so that people could create quality works without needing to fulfil an arbitrary profit incentive.
It’s just like the old “music sucks now, it was best in (insert decade of your late teens, early twenties)” argument. It’s a combination of
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Survivorship bias, you only remember the good music, movies, games of the time and forget all the trash and dumb trends happening.
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It’s when key parts of your identity are forming and you develop strong bonds with the media of the time.
And for games it’s also when your playing them the most. When you get older and get a job, partner, children and other responsibilities you tend not to have as much time for games . You can’t put hundreds of hours into a game to fully appreciate all the story and content it can provide.
Survivorship bias, […] when key parts of your identity are forming
You are absolutely right about this. The NES-era was formative for me, and I can recall the cream-of-the-crop right off the dome. But it’s easy to forget about all the bad rental carts and disappointing titles that are in my collection too. Out of the 300+ games for that system, I want to say that the very best must-play ones are probably just the top 30 or so. 10% is not a strong showing when I think about it. I want to say that later Nintendo consoles like SNES or Advance actually had a better ratio.
Edit: After watching Jeremy Parish’s videos, I’m left gobsmacked at how many more Famicom titles Japan had, and how many of them are objectively worse games than the West got.
And for games it’s also when your playing them the most. When you get older and get a job, partner, children and other responsibilities you tend not to have as much time for games . You can’t put hundreds of hours into a game to fully appreciate all the story and content it can provide.
I think many people also just generally appreciate entertainment media less as they get older, especially if they pick up some depression along the way. They might remember that they really like a game or music album from their formative years, but they don’t actually enjoy it as much as they did when they were 20. Novelty is a big factor when you’re young that tends to not have as much draw when you’re older, but nostalgia by nature isn’t exciting.
There are definitely great games these days. I’m not saying bias/nostalgia doesn’t factor into it, but legitimately the AAA space is not doing great. Sony spent most of their first party money on free to play games this generation, some of which failed spectacularly. Nintendo has bragged to investors that they are producing fewer games and selling them for higher prices. Xbox has not had significant output since the 360, lately Microsoft has been laying people off at Xbox to move people to AI. The big third parties are… EA and Ubisoft…
There are great games but most of the really interesting stuff is in the indie space and a lot of people don’t want to hunt for that.
The AAA gaming space has been ruined by letting the scope of their games get out of hand. (Does borderlands 4 really look that much better than borderlands 3?) and by greed partially to manage that ballooning scope but also to line the pockets of executives and investors. Which is also the reason for the push to free to play.
I want to be 100% clear that i listen to all the trash from 2010. It’s my favorite genre
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I would say that up to 2013, things were on a steady incline, but since then there was a stagnation, and then a decline in quality from big name publishers who used to be really great. And I don’t think it’s a “oh I’ve just gotten older and more cynical and I’m nostalgic for the things I grew up with.”
Because I can go back and play games that were well before my time, or around when I was a kid but never played, and really enjoy them. But if I pick up a game from even 5 years ago from one of the really big studios… at best it feels under cooked. Like there is potential, but a lot of stuff just never got finished. At worst, it feels as if the game lacks any intention or thought in the design beyond how to maximize the skinner box.
Take for example “vampire the masquerade: bloodlines”, it wasn’t a game I played when it came out, in fact I only played it a couple years ago, it has a lot of flaws but it is still a great and engaging experience, it felt like the team making it had a strong vision and they executed on that well. A lot of modern games from big publishers don’t seem to have a vision beyond a vague aesthetic and the final projects routinely feel disjointed and poorly thought out.
Also seems like indie games are really filling that niche now, while AAA games are mostly just phoning it in.
Like, Silksong is probably GOTY while Black Ops 6 is such a far cry from the impact that Black Ops 1 had (2024 vs 2010).
i think it really does come down to the cohesion of the teams. A small team that has worked together for years is going to make a cohesive product with a strong vision. A huge team with extremely high turnover is going to make something disjointed and dependent on formula.
Firing half the team every three years to avoid having to give them raises probably isn’t doing much to help their long term capability.
Like, the gigantic teams with high turn over aren’t new, but we’re now seeing the long term results of the strategy.
Me in 2001, pouring dozens of hours into a rushed-release game with potato graphics, truly demented plot, garbage translation, and 15 second load times every seven seconds: “this is the most fun I’ve ever had!”
It also makes very little sense nowadays. Don’t like the current new games? Play a slightly older one then, is not like they spoil…
BG3 is like BG2 all over again in all the right ways… but even bigger somehow.
Elden Ring is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Expedition 33 is one of the best games i’ve ever played.
I’m not really hurting on great games to play right now. The thriving indie scene with all kinds of wacky awesome shit is amazing too.
Feel bad for anyone working in the industry at the AAA level, but games themselves are so good. They’ve been good all my life.
Sure if you follow only the big players then they were making more interesting games when they were less corporate, but that’s the same with any art.
