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I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.
Lest I be too cranky, there are definitely some "casual" quality of life features I really can't imagine games without nowadays (I'm too used to autosaves/automaps and really don't miss undocumented features/mechanics, I try not be a google gamer) so the influence is not entirely negative, but it's a thin line to walk, one man's welcome challenge is another man's carpal tunnel syndrome. The winning move imo is to present a wide "range" of challenge within a single game to cast as wide a net as possible, but that's understandably a pretty big ask and few games pull that off - mainly rogueli[k|t]es which often have a flexible difficulty system, or sprawling autism simulators like Path of Exile that are huge enough to accommodate many different playstyles (make goofy ahh builds and shit items actually work, renounce sleep and push uber pinnacles within 2 days of league start, literally just sit in your hideout and trade all day until you can steamroll the game through sheer economic power, etc.)
Personally I
hopethink AAA gaming is a lost cause, take the indiepill or go full weeb, you won't regret it either way. You might have to do basic research with indies though, since those seem to be either absolutely neutral without a whiff of idpol or entirely woke and wearing it proudly on its sleeve, there's like no in-between.I largely agree with you here. I'd add that not only are games worse, but there are actually too many of them. This is more specific to online games. Since the golden age of WoW passed, there have been a number of well made and engaging games that failed financially b/c there are more of these games than there is a player base to support all of them at once. I think an online game with 1/3 the total number of games, but with triple the players, would be better for everyone. A current example of this are the games Mordhau and Chivalry 2. These are both "medieval slasher" type games, similar to FPS like Counterstrike, but with medieval, mostly melee weapons. They are fun. These two games are direct competitors, very similar to each other, but with a number of small but impactful differences. The matchmaking for these game are super local to your area to keep the pings as low as possible. There are not enough people playing either of the games to have a health matchmaking ecosystem, I often launch one of them and fail to actually join a match for 15+ minutes before giving up and playing something else. If only one of these games existed that would not be the case, everyone would be in a single player pool.
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I mean, the one begat the other. Once you accept the premise that "games are for everyone", it's not far from removing all hard skill gates, sanding off all the rough edges, turning the game into an effortless amusement park ride from point A to point B, and then also going full clown world on having it star some ugly lesbian with Ron Pearlman's jawline.
The western game industry is probably more people who think "games are for everyone" in the worst possible sense than not. They don't even like games in any sense you would have grown up with from the 70's through the 00's. They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.
Depending on how you define a VN and how you define difficulty, you can have a difficult VN. I've never managed to find the true ending of Kara no Shoujo, for instance. It's even somewhat possible to have difficulty on replay or with a walkthrough, although that requires a PRNG somewhere and it can be tricky to cross over from "memorisation" to "understanding required" (Miyuki's security questions in Totono are randomised, for instance, and thus immune to walkthroughs, but I wouldn't call that difficult since it's a pure rote recall task), particularly with strict definitions of what counts as "VN" vs. e.g. "raising sim" or "turn-based strategy".
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