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.

I've never played a racing game continuously for as long as I've been playing GT Sport, so it's better than it ever was for me. I've also recently gone back to Elite Dangerous which is still incredible. I never managed to get back into any of the older games. PSVR has blown my mind and if it weren't for GT Sport being so addictive I would now be playing Borderlands in VR instead. I don't have the time to play all that I want to play. Games are better than they used to be.

Last year had Astrobot, Moss, God of War, Spiderman, RDR2. Sure some have their flaws, so did the old games. Oot and Half-life had their problems as well, no game is perfect. (Well Astrobot comes close)

The older you get the less time you have (or more on your mind) to fully immerse yourself in games. That's the difference.

I'll probably ramble a bit here, but I think I can break my thoughts out into a few different points.

1. Nostalgia absolutely plays a huge part in things...to a degree. I am nostalgic for the good games of my youth, but not the bad ones. So the whole argument of "old games are elevated by nostalgia" only goes so far. The game had to be good enough to be played long enough to form a comforting and joyful period in your past. And because of that, I will always want to play a new indie game that taps into the styles from my youth, but I won't blindly love it if it's a bad game.

2. Newer games aren't necessarily of a higher or lower quality (barring technological limitations), but they're setting out to do different things, and reaching out to different audiences than games from the yesterday. Fact is, the fans of older 8 and 16 bit games are generally not the same fans who are fans of more modern styles of games, with some level of crossover, of course. So it's natural for people who used to game back in the day to not like newer directions, and natural for today's younger gamers not to like the old stuff.

3. Personally, I feel the mainstream (as in big publisher) gaming industry of today is continuing to move away from my tastes for the most part. But I'm glad to live in a time where even the "forgotten about" genres and styles are getting tons of games today on account of there just being way more games made.

Just like back then there are good games and bad games, they have just changed a lot

Yes games are getting better and that is why I keep buying new games and anxious for new generations.

But yes part of growing is accumulating experiences, so you won't get as surprised as before.

No, games essentially aren't as good as they used to be.

Now everything has a season pass. Being DLC is now the standard unlockable characters and costumes are now usually hidden behind preorders or season passes. Once getting together with friends and playing a game used to be a special event, now how many times have you went incognito trying to avoid playing with your friends online because you don't really feel like playing a fps or battle arena game, and there is no such thing as couch coop. Games are rarely even campaign multiplayer and in fact fps games are now getting rid of campaign modes all together. Generations are no longer these barrier breaking achievements in gaming and now it is literally down to frame rate and resolution.

With the rare exception, true gaming died with the Wii U and Iwata. RIP

I think the technical progress has actually made games worse because devs have no limitations anymore and hence they can afford to be lazier and less creative. For example I was playing Hitman 2016 and the mission levels were so uninteresting and samey, you are given a huge map and building where you have to walk hundreds of meters but there is no wonder and no sense of exploration and no intrigue because what you see is what you get, na mean? Whereas in the older Hitman games the levels were divided into hubs, you never knew what was ahead of you. Another modern game that I play Dirt4 has procedurally generated tracks and the driving physics and handling is so boring and unexciting, no wonder Dirt2 multiplayer is still very active, people want to have fun, not be put to sleep.

Obviously games are getting better. Storylines, sounds, graphics, presentation, splitscreen and online play, cinematics. Much more variery in plays styles, 2d, top down, side scroller, 3d, open world, VR. How can anybody actually argue that they are getting worse? Sure if you have been gaming since (like me) the 80s or earlier thay might be a bit stale by now. But the experiences games provide now are much more than they were back then. Must be great to be like 8 years old and play a game like Horizon, or GT sport with almost photo relastic graphics and sound rather than hitting a square ball back and forth with two lines on a black screen.

That's exactly what my 9 year old is doing. He has no interest in older games, even Minecraft hardly gets any love anymore. Fortnite, Apex legends, ARK, Subnautica, Horizon, Spiderman, BotW, Mario Oddyssey. Online multiplayer gets the preference as he's always in party chat with his friends from school and they all play together. Terraria is the only 'retro' game they all like.

It's different. I used to go over to my friend's house to play games. Nowadays they all simply get online in party chat. They have their discord channel when playing on a laptop, even when playing with his brother in the other room lol. My 7 year old mainly plays roblox and iPad games, Fortnite is still a bit too frustrating for him. He's more into VR than the older one though.

There's so much choice, so many free to play games, so easy to interact with friends online. The time of passing the controller and watching the other play is long gone. Stupid me kept most of my old games in case my kids wanted to play them. The older they get, the less interest in ps2, gc, xbox 360, ps3. Only the WiiU still gets some love for Mario kart.

If you had asked me in 2016, then I would have definitely said games were getting worse. Really gaming was in a huge slump. The Switch has revitalized modern gaming for me though. I see gaming getting better on the Switch. I'm still not very optimistic about the other platforms though.