I don’t want to retype everything I posted in that reply but it kind of applies to your comment as well.
In 2015 if we were having this discussion I could easily pull out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2010 to 2015.
In 2005 if we were having this discussion I could have easily pulled out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2000 to 2005.
But we are having this discussion in 2025 and I know both you and I would struggle to pull out a dozen high quality new innovating games that have come out in the past 5 years.
It's unclear what you want, exactly. Look at the list of Games of the Year I shared. There are dozens of incredible games. Have you played the games I mentioned - BG3, Hades and It Takes Two? Hit games can be similar to previous hits. That's not a bad thing though. That's just successful innovations spreading.
What I suspect is the problem is that you also want them to be groundbreaking and innovative. This is an impossibly high bar to meet in a mature industry. There are some games that still meet this bar. Half Life Alyx is from 2020, ever played anything like it? Have you truly built all the possible contraptions in Tears of the Kingdom (2023)? Last of Us Part II (2020) is going to premiere on TV in a couple of weeks. How many older video games have a story that was shot so perfectly that they be translated shot for shot into a hit TV or movie?
I don't know about you, but as I have grown older video games in general have just become less appealing. However I can see the same glee in younger coworkers eyes when talking about games today.
In 2005 I could play a game for 12 hours straight and then hardly be able to sleep I would be so excited about playing it the next day.
Today, even for a game like BG3 that is objectively an incredible game, I can do maybe 2 hours every few days and feel fulfilled.
I don't think this an outlying example either. Most of my friends are now the same way, and frankly when you login to play games online, it's not exactly overflowing with the 35-40yr olds who saturated servers 20 years ago.
I think that's just life. I felt the same way in 2005 as you did. By 2015 when this person is talking about I had other life priorities and stopped playing games as much. I still play games from time to time and even get addicted here and there but, at least for me, I didn't stop playing because the quality of games went down. I can't really say they've gone up either though. If anything people have made about the same amount of great games, and bad ones, each year for a while now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493740
I don’t want to retype everything I posted in that reply but it kind of applies to your comment as well.
In 2015 if we were having this discussion I could easily pull out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2010 to 2015.
In 2005 if we were having this discussion I could have easily pulled out dozens of groundbreaking innovating games from 2000 to 2005.
But we are having this discussion in 2025 and I know both you and I would struggle to pull out a dozen high quality new innovating games that have come out in the past 5 years.
Clearly things have gone worse.