True but those are so small and I admit I do play those mentioned titles (I think I have around 7 playthroughs of DE at this point). That said, past years had way better selection, the 2000s is considered the golden age of gaming and I can attest because the PS2 had some of the best games and compatibility with PS1 games to make it enough to last a decade. Jump to today and the variety is huge but the content is as small as a puddle. Most of the available games especially the F2P/multiplayer space is shallow garbage meant to attract whales into the scene. Guess which decade has the most F2P shit?
In my opinion a large amount of good games will make actually great games hard to make because they have to stand head and shoulder above the rest. In the past there was so much shit that you(we) played whatever was released at the time that was competently made and played well. We played the SNES release of International Superstar Soccer for a month because it was the best release right then, good controls, looked good, functional soccer game. We didn't like soccer though, but hey, it was new and multiplayer.
I posted in the "what defined playstation 2" thread that Primal was the game that defined it for me. There's nothing wrong with the game, it had good cinematics, nothing wrong with the controls or gameplay, good voice acting, models, animation, the game itself flowed well enough so it definitely had game designers and producers poking and prodding at it etc. It could be summed up as
good production values. That was when things clicked in my head, this was a modern game. It would be good if the bar hadn't been raised. There were other games of course that tied into this idea but even bad or mediocre games weren't bad or mediocre in the way that they would have been a generation ago. Bad was now "forgettable" but still playable, just bland.
Siren is a piece of shit game and I hate it but if it looked like ass and was released in 1996 on the PSX it would be a classic and I would tell people to play it and be condescending if they didn't 'get it'. Dad of War is a game that I haven't played but people seem to like it and it's got great production values and presentation, maybe it's good, Horizon is supposedly good but I read the twist to the story and it seemed stupid plus Aloy had a weird hat in screenshot etc. etc. There's so many other games to play that big releases can be kicked to the curb.
This is my actual point though. As a child a vague idea started forming in my brain: games will become something for everyone, it can't be avoided, it's just that right now most games aren't good. It will evolve, expand and grow into different things. Imagine that the first type of recorded music was death metal and 99% of it was basement dweller crap that sounded like shit. That was games at one point. But it kept getting better and more genres started emerging. Games were always destined to grow in the same way as music did, there will be something for everyone and as a person you can reject 99% of that shit and have plenty to listen to/play.
What I'm saying is that don't be surprised if a big studio AAA release is the equivalent of a big record label release that is successful because of huge marketing and
production values, except no one will be shaking their asses and rap about their wet pussy in a game.
edit: I have a fever so I'm not sure how coherent any of this is.
