They unironically are, gaming is no longer a small nerd niche, but rather a mainstream activity.
There is a lot more offer than before, but most of it is shovelware, asset flips, etc. You can find indie studios that still respect the art and produce good games, but these are the exception, not the norm. And you can basically count good AAA studios on one hand.
I'm sorry, have we already forgotten that 20 years ago you had crazy intrusive DRM that would only let your game run if your CD read successfully, if you had even a scratch on the disc goodbye game. And before that the same crap with floppy disks, where developers were literally finding out of spec ways of modifying the floppies to prevent copying and again, if your drive struggled to read it then that's your problem.
I agree about monetisation, it's rampant and not in a good way. But I do actually think the large amount of choice counteracts that - I hate monetisation in Destiny for instance....but there are several other looter shooters to pick from so it doesn't bother me that much.
>>mobile gaming is adware that popularized microtransations
And that one has never been good. Even at the advent of mobile gaming it was already like this, from the very start.
>>hype-driven marketing tactics pushing pre-sales
This absolutely existed 20 years ago already. Hype trains and preorders are not new by any means.
>>And you can basically count good AAA studios on one hand.
I think that's generalising too much - there are very good games coming out of AAA studios as well as incredibly poor ones. Ubisoft for example has something like 40k employees, some of their studios produce absolute gems and some produce....not that. It's not so simple as saying AAA is bad and Indies are not(the amount of that "shovelware" coming out of indies is absolutely staggering, people complaining that their 6728th farming sim doesn't get any sales on steam....like.....there's just too much of everything).
C'mon, the requirement for a CD to be inserted can hardly be considered DRM. It was annoying, sure, but at least all game content was physically on the disc, unlike today.
Even things like secret code lookup tables, and all the inventive ways studios attempted to fight piracy back then, pale in comparison with DRM as we know it today, which became popular around the 00s. Users are forced to install rootkits and anti-cheat software that have total control over their system, introduce vulnerabilities, and noticeably degrade the gaming experience (e.g. [1]). This is the definition of _intrusive_, not simple CD checks.
> And before that the same crap with floppy disks, where developers were literally finding out of spec ways of modifying the floppies to prevent copying
Sure, but none of these tactics were as rampant as they are today. I would also argue that copy protection is not the same as DRM. Not being able to make backups is not great for preservation, but it doesn't affect the experience of actually using the product.
>>mobile gaming is adware that popularized microtransations
> And that one has never been good. Even at the advent of mobile gaming it was already like this, from the very start.
Yes, microtransactions existed before, but they really took off on mobile devices.
> This absolutely existed 20 years ago already. Hype trains and preorders are not new by any means.
Again, not to the extent they do today. Practically every modern AAA game relies on hype, and most include pre-order bonuses, day-1 DLCs, etc. It wasn't as popular before since digital delivery hadn't really been perfected, so shipping updates was actually complicated and expensive. It used to be a major milestone for a game to "go gold", whereas now it barely gets mentioned. QA is often left up to consumers who pre-ordered the game, and it takes many months, if not years, for games to become stable. A game launching with minimal issues is a newsworthy event today.
I'm not sure why you're disputing that the state of modern gaming has been progressively getting worse over the years, when the signs of that are evident. As physical media is being phased out, consumers have even less control over their digital purchases. Modern gamers must accept license agreements that grant them temporary access to digital content, which may be revoked at any point. This is inarguably worse for the consumer in every sense than before.
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...
And it's not just about having to insert a CD - you had DRM system called SecuROM which was just as bad as Denuvo today.