In the last few years I have mostly been playing the same few games

[Chazore]

I don't feel like it's an issue of "new gamer discovery" syndrome or whatever to roll along with it.

It's more the fact that gaming in the past decade and a half, has been relying heavily on trend chasing a lot sooner and doing it on a larger and longer scale. Gaming these days has also become a big battle for the player's time and more so their money, so you have these games all spamming the same kind of game, same kind of hook, same kind of skinner's box and same kind of in-game store, battlepass and premium battlepass.

Modern gaming to me feels like it's the one trying to find itself, not me. All I've done is simply grow older, and seeing less of my once favourite series or genres be paid less attention to, simply because the modern games industry wants more and more money, more control, more power to enforce a trend to their advantage (like how companies are currently competing now for extraction games/shooters and Battle Royales)). As a result of my fave series/genres being given less love/attention, I end up having less choice in what I want to play that's new, and as such, I resort to going back to games I loved playing in years/decades past (like Skyrim, C&C franchise, Starcraft 1-2, Bro Force, Minecraft, Heroes of the Storm, etc).

Again I don't think it's a "me" issue, I believe it's an industry issue, and some gamers don't have any qualms with letting the industry tell/guide them in what to buy (some in this thread are absolutely happy to play anything new, even if it contains multiple skinner boxes and battle passes, or they are fine with a genre/game mode trend chase spam), but as for me, I don't. Just like how I don't like having ads shoved in my face practically anywhere, I don't like an industry telling me what I should be playing, instead of "here's what you might like to play, or what you yourself want to play, based on what we know you like" (which rarely happens to me these days, because ofc most of the industry now operates heavily on trend chasing, which means less games being made for different audiences, and instead more focus is put on the biggest audience that argues back less and pays more).

It also really doesn't help that the games industry keeps dolling out a spam of the same sort of games, all of them doing the same thing, and a chunk of them coming out as buggy broken messes, while also giving you half arsed apologies, which in turn makes for a hollow experience.