Strange sentiment, which is well past the massification and gamesjournalismification of video games. By then, cover shooters were just a bad memory and most serious hobbyists had for a long time embraced both indies (Braid, in 2009) and older titles (Braid, in 2015, when the article was published).
It's also obvious given the context of the very next sentence that he doesn't mean this as literally as you've interpreted.
When people are arrogant enough to claim predictive trends in something as complex as human psychology, I get doubt.
I enjoy the technical insights tho.
Braid had already made a pretty big indie-game splash in 2008 on the Xbox 360 as part of Xbox Live Arcade though the PC release was in 2009.
I was lucky enough to have played it before the Xbox release back in June 2008 on PC as a beta tester (Jonathan Blow was on the quartertothree forums and recruited testers there in the run-up to the Xbox release, iirc).
Apparently I was using Windows Vista at the time because some of the bug reports I can see in old emails are about how Braid's DirectX fullscreen mode was broken in Vista.
"serious hobbyists" would've already heard about Braid and be in the "played it already" category
Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.
chance of any individual game on that list getting played by you approach zero
and that falls exactly into the second outlined category
either the game grabbed your interest on the first try, or it won't push you over the "interested, but not now" hump in every next encounter
It's in my Steam library. I'll get around to it eventually. Or perhaps my kids will do so before me.