I think it’s most likely that more people are playing genres like platformers and fighting games that are designed for controllers on PC than before.

Game Pass is a profoundly stupid decision. It doesn’t make it’s money back and now Xbox users are used to not paying for games. And from a consumer perspective, enshittification always eventually happens with subscriptions.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.

Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.

Terraria.

Because to me Terraria feels more like a freer version of a Metroidvania than a survival game. And while you start weak you get downright overpowered.

If the game has a good enough character creator I’ll play a male. But most games and especially most Western games with character creators don’t allow me to make a male character I’d actually want to look like or at.

They were originally on Gamepedia, which got bought out by Fandom.

I’m about as old as OP, but every time I remember that my generation grew up on mostly 360/PS3 it reminds me that I was weird, my dad got an Original Xbox when it came out, which was the year I was born, and even though we had a Wii, I think we actually played games on OG Xbox more (we relied on the Wii to access the internet through neighbors’ unprotected Wi-Fi for a while though.)

I could see there being fatigue with particular genres of indie games (Metroidvanias, Rougelites, First-Person Horror without combat, speedrunner-oriented 2D platformers) but not with the very concept.

Michael Eisner once called himself “the last of the creative types in Hollywood” after he left Disney, and I can’t help but see what he meant when he said that when I look at the current American film and TV landscape. It’s like today’s Hollywood bigwigs don’t even understand why people watch TV and movies.

I kinda think this happened to Western video games too (yeah Sony is a Japanese company…but PlayStation has shown a pretty square focus on the Western market in the past 10 years.) From a consumer perspective I don’t think a new CEO is the answer. It wasn’t for Disney’s fans with Bob Chapek.

No, GameMaker Studio. That engine had it’s own controversy over moving to a subscription model, but nothing as egregious as Unity.

I still think the N64’s overall technical superiority over the PS1 is very visible. Notice how much more closed in most PS1 games’ environments are. Spyro is the main exception, but that needed a lot of special tricks where N64 just does that. I say this as someone who doesn’t really like the N64 library.

I don’t disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.

And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.

Considering piracy equivalent to hardware theft is just intellectually dishonest. In a lot of ways, but relevant to this discussion is that piracy is way less risky, so more people do it. If you try to steal a PS5 from a store I’d go as far to say you’d probably get caught and jailed. With piracy you almost definitely won’t get caught.

I’d say they are. “Mom groups who want to play Animal Crossing-esque games” certainly aren’t what I’d think of when I’d think “dedicated gaming enthusiasts,” at least not what most people are thinking of.

Steam Deck lacks publicity relative to Nintendo Switch or even traditional PC gaming, but the product itself is absolutely more accessible than traditional PC gaming, even if not as accessible as consoles.

Street Fighter V.

That was a mistake.

Basically all games of note going all the way back to the OG Xbox

I’d think:

1. Gaming PC (PC games plus emulation of most systems, including Android and arcades)

2, 3, and 4. Some combination of three systems with large exclusive libraries for which emulation isn’t quite there yet or have unique features that make emulation suboptimal (Sega Saturn, Original Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS3, and PS5 come to mind)

Also just due to sheer age, which makes it the platform with the most games period, dating back to 1995 (I know it’s getting harder to run Windows 95/98 games now but it should still be possible with effort for a lot of games, unless Windows 11 got rid of something)

That is however, with the caveat that all Xbox games have to run on Series S as well.

No.

I do think Valve not being publicly traded allows them to be different in some ways such as the flat structure (“enshittification” as defined by Doctrow doesn’t apply to Valve because there are no shareholders to please) but there’s nothing “left” politically about Valve. Some of it I think is just not having to look good to shareholders allowing Valve to make actual good business decisions.

Valve’s support of free software is because during the Windows 8 era Newell gained the fear that Microsoft would phase out Win32 in favor of UWP, cutting into Steam’s business big-time. Microsoft definitely isn’t going to pull that now that Windows Phone and the Start Screen concept both died and they’ve stated they no longer see UWP alone as the future, but I do think Valve administration still thinks it’s best for their business to not rely on Microsoft’s whims.