Are games as good as they used to be?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Most AAA development has become stale. Especially their drive for GaaS (or Live Services as they want them to be called now), which results in shipping very barebone games and bringing a roadmap on what to expect sometime in the future. But thing is, if I buy a game now, I want to have fun with it now and not 6 months down the road when they add something interesting. And if it's not live services they tend to massacre the fun out of their games with excessive monetisation schemes.

I saw the writing on the wall almost 10 years from now. My latest AAA game from a third party publisher I bought was Dragon Age: Origins (in a steelcase with some additional DLC, no less), but I could see from there where the development was going, and that future wasn't something I wanted to be part of.

Thankfully, Nintendo, Sony and to a lesser degree Microsoft know that they need to develop compelling games for their platforms to attract buyers, so monetisation isn't high on their priority lists. They need outstanding experiences to sell their consoles, and from there make money with software sales and licensing.

Indies are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are quick cashgrabs, others have way too much ego and see their games as perfect when they are far from it, but as a whole are more innovative and open than anything a big publisher would give you. They also seem to get more powerful in the graphics department in general, slowly catching up to the big publishers and their biggest advantage in their quest to woo customers apart from brand name recognition: very shiny graphics.

I don't think the video game market will crash again, but I think the big publishers will start getting less and less money because they made too good of a job in alienating their Fanbase and absolute disabilty to take any kind of criticism, especially after something bombed and got called out for it, or worse, anything about adverse working conditions, is making their customer base smaller each year, and the monetisation can only compensate so much. CoD and Fifa are both slowly shrinking again despite their latest games being well received, simply because less and less people are willing to put up to their bullshit anymore. At the same time, the indie scene is constantly growing, pushing big publishers into obsolescence.

Tl;dr:

No, they aren't. Back in the day, publishers tried to make good games so they could sell well, but nowadays the sales themselves are not so important anymore, they focus on the microtransactions and other ways to make a penny after the sales. As a result, the quality of their games has suffered a lot in the past years, and indies can only do so much yet to balance it out.