From my IRL friends to online forums, there seems to be a sign of disatisfaction with this generation 8 of consoles.
Let's start from Gen-4-7.
Gen 4-brought and improved on everything the NES did, although it wasn't as revolutionary since the controls remained the same, despite this it had high quality output of games, even though there are plenty of sh1tty ones too.
Gen 5- Gaming goes 3D and what follows is an introduction to two new controller designs featuring a joysticks, more buttons, and more ergononmic complex designs. The games played different to accomodate the new controls scheme.
Gen 6 - 3D gaming matures, online console gaming becomes a thing, and once again completely new controller designs (dual analog sticks + triggers (instead of pads) + more power = boom in potential creativity), especially if you look at the Dreamcast, Xbox, and Gamecube. Games are built to take advantage of these new features which weren't seen before and on top of that 3D gaming had matured way past the gen 5 point in terms of gameplay design. Game output was high from both Japan and USA from a retail standpoint, games didn't cost as much to make meaning more games. Games with FULL Single player and multiplayer modes were standard and none of these DLC practices you see today exist, the game you got was THE complete game, without the BS. Local multiplayer and online multplayer were common ground as well. Consoles and PCs were entirely different, unlike now. You had multiple versions (a lot of other genres as well which don't even get made anymore) of sports titles, anyone remember NBA Street, NFL Blitz, NFL 2K Football, NBA Street, Def Jam Fight For NY, SSX 3, Burnout 3, etc? The indies of today are trying to replace the AA market which boomed in this era giving us a boatload of games, but the budgets aren't their and most tend be clunky or 8-bit inspired.
Gen 7 - Pretty much a continuation of gen 6, similar controllers outside of the Wiimote. These brought on a full online (outside of the game) experience whereas before the consoles online features were seen in the games and what not. HD graphics which happened right during the HD boom, people throwing out their fat tube TVs. The gen started off pretty good (if you owned a 360) but ended weak (unless you had a PS3, but still). Since the consoles now had hard drives this meant devs could get lazy and use this "we'll fix it later" mentality" on top of that it also meant that they could not price you out the ass with DLC content and season passes, all of which became standard last gen. MS did experiment with DLC with Halo 2 on the original Xbox but that was one of maybe 10 games that tried DLC in gen 6. Games got extremely costly to make an hundreds of hundreds of developers could not compete and it literally became a war of attrition. EA. Ubi, Activition now become the 3rd party giants eating up the smaller companies and this leads to where we are at now.
Gen 8- After the war had settled we were left with only the top of top of companies in terms of revenue which means that the retail AA variety we had in the past is now gone (unless you count indies which are not even remotely the same as retail AA games for the most part). Companies which publish 14 Assassins Creed games in 6 years or companies that love that Calla Dooty Moniez and makes the same game every year. Which is why for the most part this gen is...
FPS FPS FPS
TPS
Insert random 8 bit indie (usually)
Madden
2K
Seasons passes are rampant, online only games are everywhere, remasters everywhere, local multiplayer outside of the indie space is dead, Japan is like non-existent, safe sequels instead of new IPs, and SLOW retail game output since we lost a lot of devs, little variety, little jump from last gen in the way the games played, and if you aren't into playing some ZERO quality controlled indies then f*ck you.
Even if you look at E3 2016, Sony was the only who did somewhat ok and even then only one title had an actual release date, yay for games we can't play till 2018-2019? Nintendo just showed Zelda, and MS showed plenty of uninspired games and some multiplats like FFXV, yay. Awesome E3. Where are the hell are the new big IPs? Take away the indie space and tell me this gen is actually good, do it. Indies just allow MS/Sony to fluff their game store up for the most part and make it seem like there are more games coming than there really are. I'm talking games that would actually get published and sold on retails stores as in the past gen which means quality control.
Now we are getting upgraded consoles despite none of these consoles become somewhat acceptable till last year, but f*ck you and give us moniez.
So yeah this gen ranks pretty low among the greats, Gen 4-6.
Last gen was not bad but it had a huge affect on the industry in plenty of bad ways since that's when gaming truely went mainstream thanks to CoD 4 and the Wii boom.
Mainstream anything = Money hungry men with zero passion for the hobby coming in and f*cking everything up.
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