Honestly gaming is dead to me now, even the Indie games are starting to become gay. I haven't been excited for a new game in the past 3 years. Corporatism has killed video gaming.
Just because there's tons of bad games doesn't mean there aren't good ones. For the masochists, there's Brigador, Factorio, Cruelty Squad, Kenshi, Deep Rock Galactic, Barotrauma. On the opposite end, you got Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher 1 and 2, Nova Drift, Boneraiser Minions, No Man's Sky. In between, you get Airships: Conquer the Skies, Against the Storm, Inscryption, Kingdom: Two Crowns, Loop Hero, Golden Light, World of Horror, Mech Engineer, Duskers, Risk of Rain 1,2, and Returns, Void Bastards, Blasphemous, Hollow Knight, Grime, Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum, Lunacid, KeeperRL, SS13, Dwarf Fortress- I can go on for a while. That's only some of the good commercial stuff. The indie scene is the only place there are any good games now. The game's don't magically stop being good because they've been out for more than a month or cost 15 dollars from some man on the internet. A lot of people are simply playing games too much and paying too much for bad games.
For the first part, it goes from being an escape to a part time job, an addiction fueled by sunken cost fallacy, a refusal to admit that the 12 hours a day on Roblox or Fortnite or Cod or whatever couldn't have been divided a little better, that you couldn't have taken 30 minutes to do 5 sets of 5 reps of the heaviest weights you can lift, that you couldn't spend 15 minutes a day practicing guitar or piano, that you couldn't study a language for your 30 minute sessions, that you haven't actually spoken to any of your friends in person since high school or college, that the entire western world is falling to corrupt and unceasing destructive forces of seemingly unstoppable elites and there is nothing you can do to stop it and that it would be better to just forget that it is happening for an hour or 12.
On the second part, when you spend 120 dollars on a preorder and it turns out to be complete shit, you start thinking "Damn, that's half my groceries, that's a fraction of a rent payment, that's all my credit card payments, just wasted." So, you've just spent a lot of money on a game that sucks and you can't really get your money back. That sucks. What also sucks is just buying everything on sale, hoarding a billion games in your storefronts because why not, until it all becomes noise and you are so paralyzed by the choices that none of them seem that entertaining anymore, and you end up opening and closing them until you shut off the computer and go to work or bed or whatever.
Stick to a few games at a time, cut it down to 4 hours max, and just start doing other things until you get a decent schedule and find yourself honestly having fun again. Humans need novel experiences just as much as they need stability and escapes. Being fused to a gaming chair, sitting in the same spot for entire days, every single day, is it's own form of hell.
