.@Sargon_of_Akkad published a video today (yesterday now, I guess) talking about hardened Zoomers look compared to Boomers/Gen.X/Millennials. One thing he touched on is video games having a constant improvement, and being emblematic of the times and general outlook on things.
I want to elucidate on this a bit, because video games are reflective of modern entertainment’s degeneration, moreso than just about anything else. Since forever there’s been gutter slop of every media variety; games, movies, tv (especially) and books. With games though, they usually weren’t like… the norm. It wasn’t normal to buy an expensive game, at least not since the NES, and have it be a complete irredeemable pile of shit. It was the entire point of the Nintendo Seal of Approval, or whatever they called it. Point is, it became an issue that caused a total reset of the industry.
Nowadays, it’s that same issue all over again. I buy maybe two or three new major games a year, and mostly just play indie titles or old stuff. It’s been 20 years of it now, but I still can and will sink sixty hours into a Pokemon playthrough and be happy- just not any of the Switch titles. Everything in gaming peaked in like 2013/2014 and it’s been downhill ever since with no sign of improvement. For all Revenant’s bitching about it, E33 was actually still one of if not justifiably the best game of 2025 but he’s also correct to say that in any other era, it wouldn’t be anything special.
That is all to say, the degeneration of entertainment is a direct inversion of the constant improvements Gen.X and Millennials experienced. The jump from 2D to 3D would have been crazy for them, but both are normal to us. Thus, the quality is much more salient, I feel, and that difference in quality is why Zoomers are gravitating towards fewer game purchases, and are increasingly playing either the classics, or extremely well-curated multiplayer games. Yes, I hate Epic and Fortnite as much as anyone else with taste but they’re well-tended to, as it goes for products. We hear the meme constantly of “oh this game fell off” whenever a single-player title drops 50% of the playerbase after a month but from their perspective, the ‘best’ games they have are low-cost entry live-service titles designed to keep people in a constant engagement loop via battlepasses and expansions; because, for a long time, those have been the only games that seemed to have devs who gave a fuck about making something fun.
We can compare this now to gacha games. I’m not a fan of gacha games as a genre, though I do play Arknights and used to play Azur Lane. Gacha games unironically have more care and focus put into them for the core function of the game- the waifu collecting usually- than 90% of modern AAA titles put into their core function. RPGs waste their time on gender politics, shooters waste their time on dumb story bullshit or chasing the Fortnite Meta, nothing is focused. Gachas know what they need to do to get sales, so they focus on that while Western AAA games focus on literally anything and everything else, not knowing what their audience actually wants.
Then there’s the side of this that nobody really, actually wants to talk about and it’s the artistic element of games. Yes, the writing, the art direction, model quality and music. The music of Arknights is straight up better than most traditional video game OSTs and it’s a fucking puzzle game. It has one of the highest wordcounts I’m aware of for fiction, one event’s VN segment is longer than the Bible and it’s just freely available for you to read through whenever you want. Say what you will about gacha, but that’s not something that comes without passion and interest by the writers and developers.
I don’t really have a solution to this problem, but I think it’s useful to take what I’ve said here about games, and extrapolate it out to basically everything. All of it has gotten worse, all of it is shittier, all of it is more predatory and more difficult than it used to be and I think understanding that, will help understand why Zoomers are so pessimistic about “progress”.
Source by Kitty
