The ones I'm real-life friends with just gave up on gaming. Now they're just passive, they just scroll, maybe watch whatever's on Netflix. Lucky to even see them playing COD or whatever on Xbox Live.
Honestly the late 00s were a great time to be in college with how big Halo, Gears and COD were, and that's where a lot of my Xbox friends list came from. Basically a right-of-passage ritual, exchanging Xbox usernames after all the guys got to know each other in class. Now these guys just make it through a work day and become vegetative for the next few hours. I'd understand more if they had kids or high maintenance family to take care of, but they really just don't engage with anything at all.
Almost all of my Steam friend list I befriended from the golden age of Source multiplayer games in the mid to late 00s. A lot on my Steam friends list now just say "Last online 5 years ago, last online 10 years ago" etc. It's a fucking graveyard, a good handful have actually died so it's not just metaphorical. With modern multiplayer games emphasizing matchmaking over community I haven't added anyone to my Steam friend list i I didn't mean in real life first, in over a decade.
Honestly I just miss having people I could really talk about video games with, at more than just a superficial level. Too old and tired for discords, twitter is worthless, reddit is actively hostile to anything that isn't movie games and will actively downvote most other things which exacerbates the issue. Here on /v/ you can't talk about anything without half the thread being filled with twitter screencaps of trannies whose only relevance to the discussion at hand is that they have some kind of opinion on the game.