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Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.
I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.
Yes! And my younger cousins seem to agree. You speak of MMOs, but back then, the MMOs were special too. (Ragnarok, WOW)
IMO, media peaks in a certain era and you just have to accept it. New art forms appear to have a sweet spot at the intersection of maturity and novelty. That's when their best versions are created.
For example, take movies. They hit this sweet spot from 75-95. Jurassic Park, Rocky 1-4, Terminator 1-2, Die Hard, Shawshank, Godfather, Schindler's List, Star wars etc. There are equally great movies made after 95, but they don't have the same novelty. There are equally important movies made before 75, but they seem to lack maturity (of exploiting the art form). Afterall there are only so many stories to tell. There are only so many heart-strings to tug at.
For games, that happened between the late 90s - Mid 2000s. Half life 1 - Skyrim marked an era of special video games.
A telling sign of the end of this era is when authenticity takes a back seat to subversion & commentary. This is most stark with architecture. Mid-way through modernism (right after mid-century modern and at the beginning of Brutalism) Architecture ran out of authenticity. Sometime in an earlier era, Architecture had peaked and run out of novel ideas. So everything novel fails to evoke primal emotions and everything evocative is derivative. I see this trend with games. Where everything is about references, callbacks and subversive characters. It doesn't mean it can't be interesting or entertaining. Borderlands 1 & 2 did an amazing job at exactly this. But, it can't ground an era and wears-out-its-welcome quickly. Ofc, there are still great games (Souls-likes, Larian, etc), but ofc, they're derivative. Derivative works will never be as special as the 'the first'.
Over long time horizons, there are paradigm changes. As the core constraints and tools of a field change, it allows for novelty. But it can be decades of centuries between such paradigm shifts. Until then, a mature art form must languish between derivative and subversive.
I agree that the trends you describe are observable (even if I disagree a bit with your dates) but I think an equally important factor is market conditions affecting budgets.
Middle budget is where an art form usually thrives and both for movies and games that category has almost disappeared. To be financially successful you now need to make a truly mass market game (probably with micro transactions) or develop something on a shoestring budget. The former almost always results in slop and the latter seldom has enough resources to truly shine.
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