I too agree that the condemnation of current day disc-based games is a little overblown, but it's not hard to understand where the sentiment comes from. Many game companies are fine allowing their customers to do the quality control check in the official release window after pressing it to a disc, which is total BS and sometimes completely tanks the reputation of a new game. Games get released when they aren't sufficiently bug tested or in some cases not completed, and that's become way too normalized. Such an idiotic practice, can you imagine any other industry being so boldly anti-consumer?
What strikes me is that they still put forth the effort to print physical copies of games, but they've been almost completely pushed out of physical retail. Target and Walmart are slowly, but surely fazing out the last dozen or so shelf spaces they still have reserved for games. The GameStop stores I've been to of late have almost nothing in terms of games on their shelves, they intentionally de-emphasized physical games to the point it was difficult to find and even pre-order a lot of releases, which makes no sense for a niche video game store to do. As a result, there's never anyone shopping the games in their stores, and it's a total ghost-town most of the time when I would go. GameStop did this to themselves, as much or more than the industry changes did this to them. Their entire store model was always built off of circulating copies of games into the local markets, and buying and reselling the used ones. They've abandon that. I don't believe any recent leadership at the company has any real strategy for survival, they're just there to bleed the company of any value it has left to line their own pockets and then resign. This is what typically happens to a failing retail establishment.
But I understand bikingjahuty's doomer-ism, we are reaching a point where everything that we as millennials loved about the gaming experience in our younger years, is all but obsolete. We've sacrificed so much reliability and piece of mind, in the pursuit of technological progress. The account-based digital landscape has only atomized the gaming experience for many players, local multi-player has been de-emphasized in favor of online gameplay. Folks don't even care to own the games anymore, if they can get a sub which allows them to play new releases for a limited time. We're told that ownership of software is going away in the near future, that maybe consoles themselves are going away, and it's just going to be an online subscription to PlayStation or Xbox.
I won't want any part of it, by the time gaming reaches that point. I don't think we're there yet, but the pillars are falling. Game stores are giving up, shutting down, the average consumer has made the switch to the digital marketplace. I agree with biking that gaming in the current era, almost does not resemble gaming even 10 years ago in terms of quality, selection, security of purchases, any sort of hobby aspect we enjoyed. It's become so transformed in favor of big business over the consumer, which is always the story you'd expect in our late-stage economic system. It's designed to do this as a feature, not a bug. Technology is only the accomplice helping to accelerate the enshittification of all things, and the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few. As long as we the end users can be convinced that it's being made more "convenient", it's enough that most will abide.
I'd say the best days of gaming are in the rear view. The gaming industry is flirting with apocalypse, and in a lot of ways deserves it.
