swaaye wrote on 2022-11-16, 22:10:
Maybe you are overwhelmed by the fact that there is actually an incredibly wide range of gaming options today. And sure there is no shortage of low quality shovelware or indie projects that just ran out of money. On Steam it's fairly easy to identify those with the user reviews I think.
I am mostly a player of indie games and VR these days. I feel like those are the most exciting and experimental areas.
I am willing to assume, for the sake of argument, that there may be some areas of renascence in modern gaming. But it is 95% invisible to me. The discoverability problem is so huge.
There has always been shovelware, as another poster pointed out. There also used to be a gaming press that you could mostly trust to weed most of that out. This for the most part no longer exists. The press as any sort of filter for bullshit, or stamp of quality, is utterly broken.
For a while, Total Biscuit did a pretty fantastic job of taking up the torch of actually informing consumers about the games that were coming out. He died, and frankly I've seen no one else take it as seriously as he did. It's all this weird grey area of influencers, let's players, and corporate shills. I'm pretty sure the youtube algorithm has shifted away from making the type of content TB used to do viable. Almost the entire crew around him does streaming now instead of Youtube. And games that are good for streaming are not necessarily games that are fun to play or good.
Ok, so there are Steam reviews you say? But with Games as a Service, whether it be the Destiny model or the perpetually in development Early Access model, how do you even know if the review you are reading is applicable anymore? You might get a general sentiment that people like or dislike a game, or that it's gotten better or worse over time. But how can you really gauge if, at this snapshot in time, the game is for you?
Hell, once upon a time there were demos for games. I'd get a CD every month with tons of them. Those more or less vanished. They've been replaced by "free to play" games as a service. So either I cannot try a game before I buy it, or the game has been purpose built around hijacking my dopamine gland, and then making me jones for a fix so bad when they tapper off the rewards that I get my wallet out for another hit.
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