I think the main problem in the gaming industry is that it is chasing trends too much and anyone who isn’t interested in the currently trendy genres has very little choice besides playing older games.
That’s a big part of it, plus these huge companies bought all the little developers. $ over quality.
No wonder companies want to move to a subscription model
According to steam 2/3’s of my playtime in steam is games 8+ years and older and that’s not including the games I play outside of that which are even older.
It’s almost as if the quality of video games has been in decline for years and is now reaching a point where consumers have more faith in what they already have than anything else the market has yet to muster.
Imho most of the good/decent newer titles are so big that they are daunting, while the shitty ones are equally big or bigger and marketed similarly. So of course prospective players are more likely to choose the small indie title that they are confident they will enjoy, even if they finish it in less than 50 hours or just 8 or even 2.
Studios and publishers are on a path to ruin rn and unless they ditch companies like Sweet Baby Inc and start getting consulting from firms that actually understand the gamer demographic and how good games are made, they’ll all be doomed.
But who TF cares at this point, there are so many games to go through nowadays that as long as you have a nice little hoarde then you will become bored of video games altogether long before you want to buy some shitty new title out of desperate hope.
