Idk if this is an age thing, but just how the market is lately.

AAA games are so expensive I don’t even look their way for the most part. My gaming library is big enough that for the most part I can entertain myself until what I want might goes on sale.

Companies that never put their games on sale, hardly get my coin these days. Not because they don’t go on sale, but because I don’t feel interested enough to buy most of them at full price.

There are a few games that I feel I need to get at launch, but it’s honestly been a long time since that happened. Launches also have a good chance of being buggy, so it’s safer to wait until after some reception of the game goes around.

I’m more interested in smaller studios and indie games these days. The corporate side of gaming takes out a lot of the inspiration that sparks the idea of the game. I find less corporate teams are able to connect with the audience better.

There are of course exceptions to all this, but they feel rarer and rarer.

Totally normal with the current state of gaming. Hard to get excited about a game when in all likelihood it will release as a broken unplayable mess, missing promised features and rife with microtransactions. How many times can a person be disappointed before they learn to stop being excited in the first place? I know I have adopted a wait-and-see attitude about modern AAA games.

I will say I’m cautiously optimistic about the new Armored Core game, because Fromsoft is good people and the gameplay trailers I have seen look absolutely sick

I think it’s a mix of things, as others have noted. Age definitely plays a part though, I think, and I’ve felt the same thing you have. The period of mid teens to early twenties is hugely formative and lots of preferences you acquire during those years settle in deep. I feel this mostly with music, nowadays. I remember being a teenager and constantly fiending for new bands, new artists, stuff I’d never heard before, the latest releases of my favorite artists. These days though I mostly go back to old favorites, stick to albums and artists I discovered during that 15-25 decade, even just play old records of my favorite artists instead of checking out their latest releases. Rarely do I get the impulse to go foraging for new stuff.

When you’re young you have a smaller database of similar experiences, so everything new makes a stronger impression. The older you get, the more you experience and the more any new input gets dampened by good old habituation and comparison to older similar experiences. Simultaneously, nostalgia grows more powerful with each passing year and so old favorites get more and more appealing.

To add to this though, there has certainly been a shift in how games are made, and it’s particularly noticeable in the AAA industry. I watched a video essay about the impact of the Unreal-ification of graphics in AAA games leading to homogenization of visuals, the proliferation of Ubisoft style open world collect-a-thon gameplay is very much felt (though maybe we’re moving away from it finally), and in general high budget games often end up overly streamlined and soulless.

Indie games exist, and many are excellent, but they of course do lack the capabilities that come with larger budgets.

Finally, the optimal monetization strategies for video games are starting to approach a very solved state, which has led to many publishers pushing predatory set-ups and focus on subscriptions, battle passes, microtransactions and Games as a Live Service. I’m not the biggest fan of Josh Strife-Hayes, but he has a great video about this from a year or two ago.

Combine all of these things and it’s not too unexpected to feel the way you do.

Yeah, IMO that’s just what getting old is.

“Older games” will always have an advantage, their releases span over decades and you’ll only remember the truly standout titles. There’s very few years where a single game can beat all of the older games that were released up to that point.

I think there are few different things at play here:

• You’re in your thirties - the novelty has simply worn off a lot of games. When you’re new to the medium, everything is new to you and you’re a lot more likely to feel excited about things that other people may already be tired of
• Games are a little more homogenised nowadays. There are certain a lot of fantastic games out there - particularly in the indie and AA space - but a lot of bigger titles tend to lean into catch-all design principles that have been proven to work. When so much money is being invested into AAA games, they can’t afford to take risks (and innovation is a risk).
• You may be depressed or just burnt out on gaming. You might not feel depressed in general, but not feeling excited about things you feel you should be excited about is one of the earlier signs of depression. And being burnt out isn’t all that uncommon either; video games have a huge amount of variety, but you still need to have other hobbies outside of them. If you’re not enjoying any games, there’s nothing wrong with just taking a break and focusing on other hobbies.

IDK, I always had a very specific taste in games focused more on JRPGs, 3D mascot platformers, and puzzles. and those niches haven’t exactly grown over the decade. So I never really got a chance to feel fatigued in the AAA nor indie spaces because that niche is more in. On the contrary, the platformers seemed to be nearly dead until Crash gave the genre a resurgence.

I’m not as excited for FF16 as I am 15 but that may simply be because of themes (I’m still buying day one tho). FF15 was this modern/steampunk feel mixed with high fantasy and I prefer that over the seemingly medieval/low fantasy feel. But the gap between those games were 7 years (or rather, 5 years if you count FF7R) so I wouldn’t say I’m fatigued of big budget JRPGs… because there aren’t that many.

Starfield… well, I’m just glad we’re getting closer to Fallout 5 :). Never could get really into Elder Scrolls. I’ll probably inevitably try out Starfield, but it’s not a high priority.

For context, I wasn’t very excited about Skyrim when it came out, but then had lots of fun playing it once I picked it up.
With Starfield it’s even “worse”, because I don’t even consider playing it at the moment. The game’s setting doesn’t really suit me that much.

I think the state of modern games has slowly changed over the years.

A lot of them have a set formula that we’ve all become accusomed to over the last decade. Especially with AAA games it’s all quite streamlined. Every major studio has some sort of game design style and there hasn’t been that much wiggling room.
I was able to enjoy a few newer games eventually, but only because the game universe interested me in the first place and I sort of forced myself to start playing.

There are also lots of indie games, but to some degree I feel like they also follow some kind of gameplay style patterns.

Very rarely do we get something new and super exciting. I believe the era of 2006-2016 was an outlier, where a lot of new ideas were technically viable for the first time due to excellent console and, at the later stage, PC performance, which skyrocketed a lot of innovative ideas. Both for AAA studios and indie developers.

That being said, we still get new exciting games every now and then, but they’re harder to find, harder to finance while retaining creative liberty, and it’s more difficult to convince players to start picking it up in a sea of games.

So I wouldn’t say that you’re getting old, but more like the gaming industry is getting old similar to the movie / tv show industry, where we’ve had this pattern of usual mediocreness for quite some time.

I still look forward to them, but it’s been years since I’ve gotten games at launch. I mainly wishlist them to keep track of when they start getting discounted. Usually don’t get them until the DLCs are all out. I think that’s kind of helped me still have excitement for triple a titles, since the experience has been pretty good for the most part compared to launch.

But, it’s been a very delayed excitement where some games if the reception is terrible I remove them from my plans to ever check it out. So I guess this kind of pre filtering of games I end up playing has helped curate the experience.