>>725127041
What you and others do is conflate gaming, the industry and gaming culture into one lump which leads to retarded posts like this. So let me break it down for you anon.

>Gaming
Gaming only ever gets better, technology improves, access improves, fan projects keep getting better and new games come out every day. If the act of sitting down and playing some fucking games was on a graph it'd only go up. Even if you only wanted to play up to PS2 -era games, there's definitive editions, content restorations, decomps, recomps, your games of choice have never been better and if you want them exactly as they were we have that too. Mod your PS2 and load it up. Playing old games only ever gets cheaper and better with more options. New games pour in by the boatload daily.

>The industry
The industry as it pertains to us boils down to two points: Prices and game output. Prices is self explanatory and game output refers to volume, what gets put out and specifics of releases. This can vary wildly by person but I think the general sentiment is, not as good, even bad.

>Gaming culture
Gaming culture is basically what is downstream of marketing, overall culture, forum culture, imageboard culture, online culture. It's very influenced by a lot of different things It essentially means what ads will look like, what "gaming spaces" online will be like. e-celeb crap, etc. It's true this is on the decline, as are most online based subcultures. This is mostly what people mean when they talk about "gaming being worse".

That's not to say these are all divorced concepts for example culture being more "woke" means your favorite game's mod section absolutely has a trans flag in there, said trans flag is also absolutely going to be present in the cash shop of whatever new shooter is out. I'm sure you can point out other examples of these three things influencing one another but they are still three distinct things that make up this nebulous "gaming" we love to discuss.