It happens with age and responsibilities. My kids are grown and my friend are all stressed right now, so I've played 80 hours of valheim this week and the kids have been on 16 hours of elden ring last 2 days. Before my friends and I got going on valheim/astroneer I hadn't played games heavily for like the whole pandemic.

I’ve noticed this too. I think it’s a mix of age and no good games.

There’s more games than ever coming out but it feels like the number of really good titles is still low. Kinda like movies and TV too. I guess the market is so large now it’s a lot easier to succeed with mediocre content.

It wasn't really about what games were out there just what I felt like doing. I did a lot more physical real world stuff during the pandemic.

There are tons of amazing games out there. It's just like a new book series or author though. You gotta get to the hook.

What types of games do you like I can offer many suggestions. There have been plenty of amazing games in the last 1, 3, 5 years.

Now a days it's easier to make games, you just leverage an engine not invent graphics primitives. But it's harder to get noticed and make money. And easier to make small losses and harder to have massive blow outs. Games is a lifestyle business now.

You don't need to play new games. My Steam library is full of cheaply-bought games and there are quite a few childhood games I'd love to revisit.

If you need a recommendation, I'd go for faster than light or slay the spire. If you have a lot of time, the X series recently released a free extension for X3:TC called farhams legacy, which you can pick up for dirt cheap. But there are many games that aged well.

I think this is a discovery problem, although I don't know your subjective idea of a really good title. I'd say I have more good games than I can reasonably play, some with near-infinite replayability thanks to human opponents and a chess-like complexity of outcomes.

There's a lot of cookie cutter uninspired money grubbing crap from big studios and small, but go find what people are playing by numbers, dig past the AAA shovelware, and there are plenty of gems.

There's great stuff from studios big and small. Sure they're still printing cod/bf/Madden. But they're also making rdr2/ghosts/botw/Mario Odyssey/Metroid dread/monster hunter rise. Just like indies are making valheim/astroneer/slay the spire/monster train/loop hero/hades

Yes. I didn't mean to imply all AAA was shovelware.

For me, at my age and with life, I feel guilty immersing myself, which distracts my enjoyment.

For the younglings - they can give themselves fully to the experience.

If you 'can't find a game to play' while having a fast PC, you probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.

Or maybe you're overwhelmed by choice, between Steam sales, Game Pass, indie games, F2P, Epic Store freebies, and more, there's always something new you can try out whithout spending much money at all.

Although I suppose it can still be hard to find something really enjoyable to play if you were obsessed with a genre that's effectively dead these days (RTS? MMOs? Shmups?). But even then, there's usually indie devs out to fill every niche they can spot

>>probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.

This, basically, which to me I find completely ironic, given that GAMES is literally what got me into computers back in the 80s, ran the Intel Game Lab in the 90s, worked as IT for the company that originally manufactured, packaged and shipped many many games, such as EverQuest, my best friend is an Production Director at Blizzard (with whom I worked for at Intel's game lab) and many other career accolades in the gaming space thats too lame to go into...

Whats weird, is that I ALWAYS have a high-end gaming machine... sans much gaming time...

I bought a PS5 in October because I was really excited for BF 2042. That game was a crushing disappointment. What's worse is the fact that it's pulled a lot of my friends from BF4 and they're still playing it, hoping it'll get better.

That's left single player games, and honestly single player games take a lot of time to get started. There have been weeks now where I start my playstation, look at who's playing. Look through my library to find a game I'm willing to sink hours into, find nothing and power off the machine.

Not many good games these days. I recently played through Age Of Empires 3 and 4. I just dont like stuff like Elden Ring that is popular these days due to Dark Souls or every third person game being turned into an RPG with stats and inventory and side quests.