There were a LOT (and I mean tens of thousands) of games after Pong was released to the time online updates, season passes, loot box's became a thing and those games for the most part worked great. Get off the pong thing. There were vast improvements in gaming till about the PS2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, and Xbox era. I would say the Wii and Wii U could also be seen as improvements to the past without falling into to many (if any) of the issues in today's gaming.

Now games literally destroy your console (see PS4 and Anthem), yeah, that's not okay. Not to mention the Red Ring Of Death, or the day 1 patched that destroyed consoles if for whatever reason your internet connection was interrupted, or the power cycled. Not to mention how many times has information of gamers been stolen from the online stores of these consoles? 

Also, it's not that "some people can't get over the past" as much as some things were better in the past. Again I am giving reasons that have nothing to do with personal preference AT ALL.This argument is a crutch, throw this out too it's not helping you, though I could easily get into personal preference and experience and lord that would be a wall of text I don't think anyone wants to take the time to read all of.

There were tons of games in the past that were not hard or punishing too. You get the game you want to suit your gaming needs. There are games that are ridiculously hard or complicated today for the sake of being ridiculously hard or complicated. Badly designed games, or punishing games are still being made today. You don't think a ton of games that have loot boxes are purposefully designed to be needlessly grindy? Or games with Season Passes don't have content needlessly ripped out of them?

Your mixing so much things that it becomes strange, but let's go.

I haven't said a word about bad practices like lootboxes and the like. I was talking about complexity in games increasing and with it bugs. It doesn't take much to see that the more complex a system is more prone to defects it is. And them you put improvements basically attached to Nintendo.

There are bad games now and there were bad games in the past. Many games were broken and wouldn't be playable, they just wouldn't affect the console because the console didn't had any system that could be impacted by the SW. Red Ring of Death have nothing to do with games being better or worse but with MS rushing their engineering to reach the market first, so I have no idea why you put it here. And consoles being beyond user repair due to a bad update is something very rare to be even worth mentioning.

Security on the networks also have nothing to do with games being better or worse.

Your reply seems more like why you don't like gaming today than games being worse loaded with a lot of strawman. For you Don Mattrick gave the solution stick to NES.

Uhm, okay... Well, I’m also not reading any books.

You don't have to talk about loot boxes, etc, they are bad practices present in games today though. You can just agree.

Second this is not talking about games (except for Anthem breaking PS4 consoles), but the consoles of old didn't brick. So no not about games, but gaming in general.

Network Security may not have to do with games in general, but buying games online has cost people a lot of headache and possibly money. 

You still have not made a single solid case for gaming to be better today than it was in the past. I can give you numerous examples of gaming today being worse, and games mostly involving shoving incomplete messes out the door, and predatory practices that really can't be denied in a lot of AAA games. 

I don't hate gaming today, but it is a lot less enjoyable than it was in the past. And I do have a lot of older systems, and play on them regularly, except for my 360 which recently had a RROD, lol.

If no one is defending it then why bring then? And they have nothing to do with how good or bad games are.

The thread is about games being good or bad, and you can certainly find old consoles that failed. With time fails just change in nature, basically in almost all fields. Cars failed differently 50 years ago.

I haven't gave you no examples because you are derailing thread and making strawman. The discussion is about games today being as good as they used to be. You are discussing why gaming for you isn't as good as it used, different topic.

I just don't buy this "games aren't as fun as they used to be" argument, not as some kind of objective statement of truth. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 and I would say that, on an individual basis, I probably have more fun with most of the games that I play now then I did with most games from the Atari to the PS2. The stuff I play now generally has a LOT more content, better writing, better mechanics, less frustrating conventions, less loading screens, better save practices, better characters, and more immersive worlds. I'm very happy with the progress gaming has made.

I don't really understand why people do the "I'm going to pick out a great game from back then and compare it to a bad game from now" thing, either. That's kind of silly. You could throw a stick back then and hit at least 5 terrible games because there was so much shovelware.  Big name stuff, too, like Star Wars, had absolute garbage games.

Another point is "lack of innovation."  Well, yeah.  That happens as ANY industry matures.  There is only so much innovation to find relative to technology.  Immature industries have a lot of experimentation, much of it bad, before people find out what works well and what does not.  After that, refinement becomes more prominent.  

Look, I get that some people as they get older fall into that "this is what I like and anything that changes it is bad" mentality.  But that's you, not the media itself.

I think most games today are better than older games. They have better controls and quality of life improvements and such.

I think the problem with newer games is that they just don't impress us as much as the older games did. Because most of the time they just improve upon or rework what older games did rather than doing something actually new. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think it's natural that there would be less innovations as time passes. and reworking ideas can still lead to fun games.

But I will say there are certain franchises that just aren't as good as they were before and it's not because of a lack of innovation. It's because the developers forgot what made those franchises really enjoyable in the first place.

Games released unfinished back then too. There was just no internet for people to make a big deal out of it.

My favourite 3 games were released last millenium, out of my top 50 games maybe only 7-8 were released in the last 10 years. My favourite games tend to come from the NES, SNES, PS1 and PS2 generations but I think games are getting better. If I honestly look at the quality of games 20 years ago, I don't think most people would play them compared to what we have now.

But if you feel the magic has gone that you felt as a kid, it's because you aren't a kid anymore. You were easier to impress and everything seemed new. It happens to us all, but I have to say that VR gives me the same excitement that just regular games gave me as a kid, it really feels like something new right now.

No.

Microtransactions have become an industry norm and their very inclusion warps the progression system to being as tedious as possible. Games are deliberately being made more boring as a matter of corporate philosophy. On the multiplayer side of things it is either a deliberate imbalance that is only corrected by a credit card, or it rolls with the alternative of having countless items hidden behind a slot machine when they should be unlockable. The mere presence of these is the industry's method of putting gamers into a state of perpetual psychological siege, and developers have shown themselves willing to quietly add them post-launch.

In the Bronze Age you often needed an expansion pack for additional content, but DLC offered that possibility over the Internet. Awesome. However, these expansions are typically getting smaller, duller and more expensive, while sometimes being carved out of the game itself to be sold back to you at a later date. Information that is important to the narrative is hidden behind a paywall. In some games, not buying the DLC results in an incomplete experience as some features cannot be accessed in the base game without the DLC.

Despite companies making more money than ever, they feel it necessary to execute mass layoffs while releasing broken, unfinished games. To compensate, now they're saying that they have "roadmaps" to improve the game, which is them basically taking a year-long grace period to fix what shouldn't have been broken to begin with so they can rush some uninspired garbage to the shelves before the development cycle is even complete.

In the airline industry, developments like these are part of a formula called "Calculated Misery". Developers are choosing to make games smaller, duller, and just plain worse, not because they can get away with it (they are) but because it's more profitable (it is). If you enjoy paying a premium on an inferior product, then the state of the industry has never been better and the next few years are going to be awesome.

I didn't consider myself a gamer when I joined this site and that was thanks to the state of the industry. I was still vaguely curious about it and open to becoming one, but the sheer contempt the industry has for its audience and its abusive relationship with gamers is a deterrence that I'm just unwilling to tolerate.