Sit down kids and I shall tell you a tale of long ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_Games
This was manifesto games. It launched in 2005.
This is a manifesto published on manifesto games in 2006:
http://web.archive.org/web/200610211510 ... /node/1943
This is 7 years ago. Do you know when Greg Costikyan decided that videogame publishing was broken? Not in 2005, that's for sure.
Look at the content and background provided in that article. Look at the games referenced. Steel Panthers, Heroes of Might and Magic, Space Empires IV, Disciples II - check the release dates on those games if you want.
The manifest isn't written by Costikyan, but his fingerprints are all over the entire thing.
Here's an especially ironic quote:
In fact, as with any iconic terminology that is familiar to the Masses (See, I can’t help myself.), there is also the chance that such verbiage will be perceived as anachronistic and irrelevant instead of challenging and dynamic in the sense we intend.
Of course, Manifesto ended up being _completely_ irrelevant, and all the talk of revolution in the games industry ended up being little more than a dull brainfart.
Why is this relevant, Cybernetic Pig? Because this hatred of the current and nostalgia about the past is a continual cycle; it is a running trend that would be a joke if not for how serious the practicioners seem to be about it.
Concretely, not everybody thought things were rosy-red in the 2000-2005 era of video games, even though that period saw releases such as Deus Ex, Half Life 2, Halo and Halo 2, Residen Evil 4, Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2, Neverwinter Nights, The Sims, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, Metroid Prime, Civilisation 4, Knight of the Old Republic, God of War, Battlefield 1942, Super Smash Brothers: Melee, Doom 3, Diablo 2. I mean, think about that for a second. We're talking 5 classics _a year_ for that period. There is not a single one of those games that can be considered shallow; granted you probably don't need to play some of them for more than 5 hours to get the point and take the experience with you, but each and every one has had hardcore fans that deeply invested themselves for good reasons, each and every one of them brought something new to the table and took risks. None were safe. I myself have logged 500 hours of Civ4, just to grab an example, and more time in diablo 2 than I care to think about.
And this is just the cream of the crop which was recognized by awards shows and the press, our glamour games. These are our 'academy awards' winners; for each of these there are 25 lesser known but high quality games, some of which could be considered classics within their own genres. Gaming was booming.
And here comes along a couple of dipshits (because that's what they were) who thought to make a business for games sticking it to 'the man' (big publishers), and they ended up backing such wonderful things as Super Columbine Massacre RPG. These were learned men; academics who were guest speakers at universities, and whose writings were used as curriculum for courses. These were supposedly 'experts'. People with influence among academics (I participated in an IRC chat with a doctor and professor teaching game theory with focus on narratology, a professor teaching game design with focus on ludology, a very well established game theory author, and Costykian himself), I might add, people who were highly respected by their peers. And they pull this shitty website with this shitty, irrelevant rhetoric out of their bums.
It's hard to overstate this point. These were a bunch of sad old men sitting in their ivory towers, watching the biggest boom in gaming _history_, and their response? 'Meh'. They deserve not just to be chided, they deserve to be verbally cut down for making such a massive misjudgement about the health of the games industry. In the end, it seems they were way more interested in thinking about what to write about games than actually playing them or understanding the medium in a broader cultural context.
When I saw this thread, it made me think of Manifesto Games, and I'm sure you've already figured out why: I think you're really wrong about the current state of the games industry, and I think you say what you say because you're unreasonably disillusioned.
You're right, there's a lot of crap out there. There's also a lot of crappy movies. There's a lot of crappy writing. I don't know if it's the relatively short age of gaming that provokes people to latch on to this idea that things are going down the toilet and something must be done, but it seems even those of us who are supposedly the smartest fall pray to it. And Jaedar is right that EA is in full tilt at the moment; the whole simcity debacle was very likely caused by their desire to run a simcity shop where you can buy such interesting dlc as "sausagefest 2015" which adds the ability to play with 10 different kinds of hotdogstands in your town for a mere 5 dollars. They and a bunch of others have a massive hardon for microtransactions, which appear to tap into a weird tendency among consumers, and yes, it _is_ problematic because market research essentially indicates that there's a significant market for 'pay to win' microtransaction games. Which, yeah, go figure: Magic The Gathering and Pokemon exist for a reason.
But all that aside...your outlook is simply too bleak, and you are way too nostalgic. There's still massive amounts of good games coming out. Gaming companies are finally (fucking finally) starting to really figure out cooperative games and games where your social circle role and your in game role meld. And even when companies are putting out derivative crap, there's often room for innovations and advances in various interesting ways...not to mention gaming as a spectator experience, which is getting fucking huge.
Gaming criticism is also in better shape than it has ever been before. Gaming usergroups on reddit present indepth discussion where the good stuff actually gets promoted, and podcasts and letsplays and youtube reviewers provide a much better and more in-touch review-experience than print-magazines ever did. Not to mention that reviews-as-entertainment itself is growing rapidly. Gamespot might be a cesspool filled with useless ichor, but for every gamespot there's a totalbisquit, not to mention the niche podcasts which cover specific gaming communities.
And fuck, whatever else you feel about minecraft, terraria and little big planet, game modding and game creativety has finally found it's way into games as an actual gameplay element. The rise of the mega-expansion-game has also come about - there's like 10 expansions for the sims. If a game is popular and expandable, game companies are now willing to keep improving the experience further and further. They're pressing the envelope in a lot of new, weird ways - and I haven't even mentioned kickstarter.
Gaming has made absolutely massive progress in the last 3 years alone. When you say gaming is going down the crapper, you sound like a friend of mine who loves to argue that the simpsons was best from seasons 3 through 9, never being willing to admit that this was probably because he just happened to be the simpsons exact target age bracket for precisely those 6 years of his life. It's ridiculous. It's just as ridiculous as the Manifesto group being formed at the end of a god damned golden age.