Games are more expensive nowadays. Outside of indies, maybe, I feel like ideas of games taking risks, creatively exploring and forcing boundaries are far less likely to get grenlighted than, say, two or three decades ago. The same applies to movies and books, to an extent. The risk and marketing factor is essential.

Like modern Hollywood movies, most game developers today bet and thrive in slam-bam seductiveness, readily gobbled up by kids, teenagers etc. You aren't challenged, you aren't mentally stimulated, you don't acquire anything from it but cheap, safe thrills.

Of course, though, there are exceptions. Plenty of them, if you have the patience to look. That doesn't necessarily mean they're the best games ever, of course, despite their amazing graphics. For even a cretin could creatively compete with what's out there.

Wow, a 6 year necrobump. Kind of a topic worth revisiting though. Except that I think now it's less that the games being made today are inherently inferior to the games of yesteryear, so much as the modern AAA game industry ruins games with their monetization practices and focus on making money over a quality product and trend chasing over creativity. There are still plenty of good games to be found every year, both in the AAA space (Super Mario Odyssey, Zelda BotW, Red Dead Redemption 2, Spiderman) and the indie space (Dead Cells, Undertale, Celeste). However, tons of major blockbuster games have been disappointments, like Anthem, Fallout 76, Star Wars Battlefront etc, either because the company rushed them to market, was only making a game because it was the popular thing to do (like with the Battle Royale trend), make the games super grindy and unrewarding in order to incentivize buying microtransactions or worse yet lootboxes, or some combination of those (Anthem being a prime example as a grindfest Destiny clone with very little real content). On top of this, the AA games in between indies and AAA, like Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice, are becoming very scarce, as the game business becomes an all or nothing thing with either an indie game that can thrive on very few sales or a AAA game that needs massive marketing to be successful. There's no room for all the little AA gems that fill our memories of past console gens. What you end up with is a sea of indies where very few things stand out, several high profile failures that do stand out, nothing in between, so only one or two games a year truly feel great, and you get the sense that games are getting worse. Really though, there are tons of good games, but most of them are quickly forgotten indies, while the games that stick out in your mind, the heavily marketed AAA ones, are hit or miss.

I feel like i'm having just as much fun playing games these days as ever, if not more since I understand way more now than I ever did before. Though back in the day 80's/90's I played a wider variety of games. Now I pretty much only play RPGs (of various types) and 4x games.

Also I am one of those players that feel that the move to 3D killed many game series that I used to like (mario, zelda, metroid, etc).

Yeeeeeessss! The only things about gaming that are worse now are the unsavory elements that have been introduced buy certain publishers. I know that's vague, but you know what things. And you know the whos.

Maybe technically they are better. There’s a higher production value, they look, play and sound better. They’re bigger and more elaborate. On average they have more of a story and there’s way more options.

But, that all means jack if they’re not as fun. And on average they aren’t. There’s a reason my Top 50 list from the end of the year event here on VGC is mostly ‘90s/early ‘00s games with a handful of modern games thrown in; they aren’t as fun as games used to be. They aren’t as imaginitive. Most games feel like I already played them before and innovation has gotten stale for the most part. And since ‘fun’ is the most important thing, I can’t say gaming is better now, it’s the opposite.

EDIT: And then I want to play a game right as we speak. 20 minute install time and update. Remember when you could just pop in something, flick a switch and you were in the game? Just like that? Now a console needs to boot up all kinds of pointless cr*p, take forever to navigate all kinds of pointless menus, install god knows what and update literally everything. Suddenly I don’t feel like playing anything anymore.

People seem to just want to ignore the complexity of the games and how many possibilities for glitches is there on games today compared to Pong. And even at that time you had so many freeze screens.

I had to reboot my console almost everyday because a game froze or as we said "tilt". Nowadays the patches happen off screen and I will run on a need to reset the console maybe once a week but more likely less than once a month due to glitches and bugs.

People just don't understand that what they like up to their 25 years is more or less what they will like forever, so they will keep thinking nothing is as good as it was in the past (because they can't see without the tinted googles of nostalgy to see how bad it really was) and not enjoy today.

How many games were actually 30-60min long but were so badly engineered to be "hard and punishing" to make you think the games where giant that we took 6 months to finish? There is good reasons for that to not fly anymore today, with internet we can discover how to pass or how long the game really is, we can jump to another game fast if the one we are playing isn't satisfying among many other reasons for this type of game design to not be widespread anymore.

Sorry to tell you that in books no new stories have been told in like 1000 years as most are based on same elements. And when you read a lot you'll recognize it. Same with games, you don't create new genres everyday, but when gaming technology was changing radically each gen new genres occurred more easily first because there were less and second because the roadblocks changed big each gen. 

Well, it depends how generically or not you define a narreme. With enough simplification of forms, everything would look like a square, right?

And that's mostly our mind dividing things up and searching for commonalities, of course. Taxomony it's part of its basic functions.

I would say you are right.

It is all about how much luggage you accumulated to see things repeating and also your mindset to look at what is different and let the story/game surprise you or looking for what you have seem before to complain it doesn't surprise you.

Even without trying most stories I see, be movies, bookies, series or games I discover the end much before the end. Even the investigation series like Monk I had the culprit know in like 5-10min into the episode. I keep bothering my wife saying what is going to happen next and almost always guessing right. Still I enjoy the process of how that is being done.

I think its largely due to things being more special when you're a kid.  There are still a lot of great games and in some cases, they are better than the equivalent game from yesteryear and in some cases they are not as good.