Games haven't gotten worse-that "golden age" era where developers were bubbly, plucky folks who only had the intentions of making players happy is a false narrative inspired entirely by rose colored glasses.
You see, people think game developers being overly greedy and cheap is a new trait that developed in recent years. It ain't! See, we know what retro games are good now, but in the past, buying a new game was such a gamble the process of buying a new game might as well have been like opening a loot box in of itself! See, if you bought a game from say, nintendo or sega, you could at least get a get a relatively good idea that it's good..but outside of that, it was a free for all.
More often than not, games were made overly hard to artificially increase their length. Respecting the player and whatever toleracnce they may have for frusteration wasn't a thing; making completing a game a smooth, comfortable experience wasn't a huge concern for even the best of Retro games. Rather than working on compelling gameplay, game companies saw fit to hook kids on their game by beating the crap out of them. Then theres the licensed games-while still bad today, it was sooo much worse back then. The games didn't even need to be functional.
These tendencies are simply expressed in different ways in the current gaming industry-unfair mechanics became grinding, selling you on a popular product became selling you on a fancy item, LJN became EA.
Now, youd likely reply to this, "But LJN doesn't make up all Retro games!! What about Super Mario World, the Megaman Series!!"
Yea, exactly-I'd make the same argument about modern games. The good-to-bad game ratio hasn't drastically changed, but rather the stuff bad games do has become much more insidious. You still have say, Super Mario Odssey, Breath of the wild, God of war, the Crash bandicoot remakes, etc etc etc..and you might dislike any of those games, whether they're amazing or not isn't the point. But what I'm saying is, there's still games coming out with fleshed out, fun, pure single player campaigns! There's plenty! Yes, I know EA is still being a moustache-twirling villain coming up with new schemes to screw over and demean gamers. But we should stop acting like that makes up the majority of the industry! They ALWAYS did that, they just have new toys nowadays!
It's not going to make the gaming industry any better to look at the worst of the worst and act like stinks up the whole place-predatory gaming practices were always there. But buy the good stuff, and don't tolerate the bad stuff. This idea that video games these days are a wasteland of dlc and microtransactions is built out of sensationalism and bias.
