The Last of Us Part II

Today is absolutely the golden age. We stand at the point where making and selling a game is easier than it has ever been.

I think over the years, people will continue to move away from PCs as a gaming platform to mobile devices, and shovelware from the casual, pay-to-play game companies will keep the market so saturated that it will be hard to discover great indie titles.

PS. your list is missing Disco!

I tend to agree with him (well, for me 95-2004 is the golden era) for the reason that it's mostly "been there, done that" nowadays. In addition, you have a lot of bad business practices such as microtransactions, lootboxes, terrible DRM (Denuvo, Steam etc), release of unfinished products and you can't even buy the games physically anymore. Apart from some indie games, nothing really seems worth it. As someone who started playing PC games at the beginning of the 00s, I'm mostly playing ones released in the 90s and early 00s. The main issue with older games is typically the UI and controls. Apart from that, they feel a lot more "fresh" due to its content and often times experimentation. In contrast, a lot of games these days stick to the same things and at best combine two genres into one (roguelites for instance). Or they take old ideas and just build on top of it. Very rarely you get something like "Return of the Obra Dinn".

For me personally, I would add Hollow Knight to the list.

That is one of the few games I intend to always have installed on at least one machine.

Minecraft is the best game I have ever played in 25 years of playing games. Nothing like it. A masterpiece. Once in a generation masterwork. Created an avenue for creativity for a generation. It's for the history books.

Totally agree. Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. Same with the wargame series being the best rts game ever released, in complexity combined with real time and unit balance it's unparalleled.

The only 90 games worth talking about anymore are the rpg games, the space simulators/rpgs and Homeworld. As in that you would actually prefer to play it instead of a modern game for none nostalgic reasons.

And we still have games breaking new ground like Disco Elysium.

I played a lot of games as a teenager in the mid 2000s, and they kind of sucked. The graphics aged terribly compared to something like SNES or N64 games and the game play wasn't that great. 2010-2020 has undoubtedly been the golden age of gaming, thanks to Steam mostly. Without physical discs, lower indie price point games could be sold and still turn a profit.

From a quality and diversity standpoint, the last ten years have seen the best games ever made, a lot of them indies.