I've been gaming from the 1980s until present day.
Maintained Interest:
* RPGs - my favourite genre
* Sandbox games - I consider Will Write games in this genre - everything from SimCity to SimEarth, and even The Sims - I was highly disappointed that SPORE was less of a sandbox than I was expecting. But I was playing Dwarf Fortress by the time SPORE came out, so my interest in the genre didn't wane. Also, sandbox elements are integral to Paradox Games grand strategies. So there's a lot of overlap.
Reduced Interest: or games that were among my most played genres, but have fallen back from games that I'd play for hours, to games I probably won't play for over an hour.
* Platformers - was one of my favourite genres in both the 8-bit and 16-bit, but Mario Galaxy and Shovel Knight are the only two games I played much of in the last 15+ years. Maybe a bit of Kirby.
* Adventure - I played a ton of these in the 80s and 90s, and again with the Nintendo DS revival, but I have stopped playing them since then, but maybe I'll revive my interest in them soon, since Switch got some interesting ones.
* Action adventure (BotW is an exception) - Yeah, I don't really play these anymore. I'm not sure when it stopped, probably after the Wii era.
* 4X Strategy - I've found the genre becoming increasingly convoluted without improving the experience. I think the genre peaked somewhere around expanded Civilization 2/Test of Time, Master of Orion 2, and Alpha Centauri - many like Civ 4 the best, and I'd say its because it has some interesting features, but I found that the Civ 2 modding scene and the actual expansion and warfare + presentation (like the wonder movies and advisors) made that game more interesting in Civ 2 - after Civ 3, I found warfare and expansion substantially less fun than Civ 1 and 2; and so I lost interest in those games. The other 4X trend is the loads and loads of modifiers and complexity that makes the game kind of boring - Stellaris has buildings with like 8 or 9 modifiers each, some of them don't even seem to mean anything. Another thing is that Grand Strategy kills 4X, I think 4X hit it potential, and all attempts to advance the genre have resulted in making the core experience more frustrating in an attempt to stop people from map painting as fast, and also making it more convoluted. Complexity serves grand strategy WAY better than 4X.
Lost Interest:
* Fighters - Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Playstation), Smash Bros (N64), and Soul Calibre (Dreamcast) were the last fighting games I was interested in.
* RTS - Peaked with Brood War, and then waned in interest during Age of Empires (more on that franchise later).
Gained Interest:
* Grand Strategy - always liked the genre, and saw potential. I used to play the crap out of this old WW2 grand strategy, and of course, the KOEI grand strategy games, but with Age of Empires, the grand strategy elements interested me a lot. Around the time they were out, I got involved with Paradox Games grand strategy. Somewhere between Medieval 2 Total War and Paradox's Victoria 2, I converted 100% from KOEI and Creative Assembly to Paradox Games. As I said, a lot of this is cross-over with sandbox gaming, because sandbox elements are heavy in modern grand strategy.
* Open world - always liked them, from the original Zelda and Metroid, but I've found I like them more with BotW and Witcher 3. So, you could say this is where I really like Zelda. These games often have some sandbox elements as well, Breath of the Wild especially.
Developed Interest later than other genres:
Casual games - I became interested in these in the late 1990s with a couple of browser games called Utopia and Earth 2025. But Animal Crossing on Gamecube really solidified my interest in these. I still play them on my phone to this day. Basically, any games where I can pick them up, play for a few minutes, and put them down - usually with new tasks each day to complete.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
