Never been a better time to be a gamer! True or false? (Poll)

[Chazore]

SvennoJ said:

As far as excitement for gaming, late 90's early 2000s had the biggest dreams come true. Rapid advancements, new genres and IPs springing up monthly. Exciting new hardware coming out and new ways to play. Real competition driving creativity and keeping prices stable.

Today that excitement is mostly gone. Lot of talk about diminishing returns, price of HW, price of games, invasive practices, people getting fired all over the place, studios closing, games taking many years to develop, UE5 woes, and so on.

I feel this so hard within my soul (bolded). The last game I can remember off the top of my head that I was both excited before and after release was Cult of the Lamb (because it oozed charm, and felt like something slightly new, mixing a village sim with a hack n' slash dungeon crawler and starvation mechanics).

Since that game came out I think 2 yrs ago?, I haven't really been excited or hyped for anything since, and before that it was Cyberpunk (hyped before release, massively disappointed upon release and the yrs that followed).

I fondly remember the times where I would boot up my PS1 and be enamoured by the Sony logo bootup sound (still does it for me to this day, by far my fave start-up sound), and popping in my Resi 1-3 games, my Die Hard Trilogy, my destruction Derby, Crash Bandicoot, Medevil, Syphon Filter, Twisted Metal 2, etc, and just being so happy to play all those games.

Today I'm less excited for so many reasons, ones like:

• How much space will the game demand of my drives?.
• How much is the game going to cost above other games?.
• How many MT's will the game come with?.
• How many bugs is the game going to ship with?.
• Is the game going to throw me on a Battle/season pass hamster wheel?.
• Is the game going to respect my time and actually treat me with respect and not have me grinding some pointless crap?.
• Will the game even be available in my own region? (Issue created once Sony started enforcing PSN, causing regional lock-outs).
• Will the game even be sold on my client of choice? (Issue introduced as soon as EGS showed up, EA and Ubisoft were selling on Steam before, when EGS showed up they followed Epic's false leadership).
• Will the game run on my current hardware? (Some Japanese studios still haven't caught up in terms of port quality, and Unreal Engine 5 provides more shader compilation stuttering than ever before). 
• Will I have to check PCGaming Wiki to resolve multiple issues? (Seriously, no one should have to use it for new games, except for games ranging from 1980-2010).

And to top all of that off, like you mention, we have to wait untold amount of years for some games, from publishers who previously had decent track records for game releases. Because they take forever to release certain games, the excitement dies off, and the reality sets in, dulling the end-resulting experience. 

Also doesn't help that today's industry is largely driven by investor interests, the crap journalists like IGN/Kotaku spit out (both of those sites know very little on what gamers actually want, only what they want and they push their ideals way too hard, even against regular gamers that don't agree, and that's created such a bad tonal shift in the industry as a whole, and adds to less excitement build-up.

Then of course there's another part where the industry loves to trend chase, spewing out Battle Royale after BR, metroidvania after vania, or Souls-like after Soules-like, while other genres remain neglected, because they either don't have a big enough crowd or don't print money like Fortnite (which isn't a gamer issue, because I'm still waiting for the RTS genre to come back, everyone else making games are the ones who left me in the dust).