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SvennoJ on 22 October 2025
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Mummelmann said:
BasilZero said:

2011-2014

It went downhill after the PS3/X360/Wii/PSP/DS era ended.

Second this, it was so active back then. Granted, there were also a lot more issues with bad behavior on the boards, but it was a decent trade-off all in all.

There were great discussions every week, about sales and game releases. Long and insightful posts about games and gaming, whereas now, the majority of longer posts appear to be about other topics (politics). I suppose this is organic, in a way, as gaming has grown so much more mainstream, it becomes intertwined with more and broader subjects and individuals. 

Personally, I'm approaching my 19th year in here, which is insane, it's nearly half my life. I don't post all that often, but I still check vgchartz every single day, and usually multiple times a day at that. 

A similar thing happened to gaming as to TV. When the selection was still smaller, major new releases stood out, got a lot of build-up, then release discussions and comparisons between systems. And many more people played new releases at release. Many more people played the same games at the same time.

Nowadays the market is so saturated with games, games are much longer, people play their backlog and new releases hardly get any (pre-)release attention. No more 'official' threads for major AAA releases. Nowadays most people are playing different games and get to new releases whenever (sale or subscription)

Gaming has turned from 'community events' to 'what are you playing now'. The last really hyped game was CP2077 and that sorta killed the pre-release hype machine. GTA6 is coming in half a year but mostly in silence. On here anyway. It's harder to have discussions about games when people are all playing different games, very limited perspectives on new releases. It takes the release of Switch 2 now to get some discussions going about the launch games.

Earlier this time used to be the busiest period of the year with new AAA game releases. Now I don't even know what's coming out this season. And it's not just here. I still follow Eurogamer (although deleted my account there) for new game releases but I still have no clue what the big games are this season. Plus there as well, big new games releases used to trigger threads 1,000 posts long, now comments are in the dozens.

And agreed, there's a lot more about gaming 'politics' nowadays than about the games themselves.

Is the excitement gone in gaming? Has it all become too familiar? Too predictable? Too political? Too safe? Boring?

With gamers spending most their time on GAAS nowadays, gaming has become a routine instead of looking forward to the next 'fix'. Attention has shifted backwards, from looking at what comes out in 2-3 years to what are good older games to play. Both a result from E3 always over promising then under delivering (before getting scrapped altogether) and games now rarely releasing finished. Always better to wait. 

And since anticipation delivers the best dopamine, the excitement is much lower nowadays.

Gamers went from living in the future to now mostly living in the past. Nostalgia threads are much more common than speculation about upcoming games and hardware. (Also because leaks are far fewer, industry learned their lesson with early hype bullshots etc)