10 a year sounds a lot! I'm at 2.5 so far this year and that's already 362hrs of play time (I know I'm slow)! None of them are "new" either. First time I've played them (technically) but they're not 2023 releases.

TBH I'm kind of put off a lot of the new ones. Seems a lot of recent ones have used that HD-2D artstyle which I'm just not willing to pay full price for. The games sound interesting, but I just expect lower prices given the artstyle.

I guess we’re just getting older.

For example I haven’t played the new Zelda game for weeks now, and not much in general at that. Let alone something else. It’s excellent, and I will finish it at some point, but if even that can’t hold my attention for a prolonged period… Also, when I visit a friend, we might play a game, but it’ll still be the same old RTS we can play through LAN from over two decades ago. I wouldn’t necessarily say “modern gaming sucks”, but I guess I would say “modern gaming is vastly uninteresting” (when you’ve played a ton of things already in the past).

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.

Not that much. As long as they keep coming, I will enjoy them. Disgaea 7 in October, Persona tactics in November at least. Might play One Piece Odyssey. That would make 6 already.

Some JRPGs don't take that much time either.

You say that with all these bangers this year. Tsk tsk.

Same here. With more life responsibilities, you get less time to enjoy yourself. I've been mainly playing Overwatch and Apex Legends for the past couple years. Unless there's a major big release (GTA, Red Dead, GoW), I just stick to quick MP games.

Careful. I started out this way around the time the PS4 came out, and it wasn't long before I was basically sitting in a basement, playing thirty-year-old games exclusively, and watching movies on my VCR via a CRT television. Wouldn't listen to music unless it was on a CD or LP etc. It was more or less me trying to self-sooth and futilely attempting to control the world around me, because it was changing too much. It was delusion at its finest (I too chalked it all up to everything sucking now compared to the past), and damned near erased me. It's not healthy at all, and if you don't force yourself out of it, it'll eventually consume you. 

I've certainly felt the walls-closing-in-paranoia of the dreaded backlog myself, but I solved it years ago by simply narrowing my tastes down and condensing them. You step back, think about the real have-to games, and buy/play them first. Then, if you have time, you get into the next tier etc. If you find that you don't get through your have-to's fast enough, well... that's okay. You're playing the very most important games anyway, so you're all right. 

It's a mindset, is what I'm trying to get at. There really isn't a deadline, only the deadlines we make for ourselves. You don't have to play everything. It's okay.