Quantity or quality of indie video games cannot carry the state of the medium right now which is absolutely 100% god awful. In the 90s there was only Magic. Now every video game is Magic, but with guns. Or anime.
This is just silly. That's like saying fine art photography is dead because most pictures taken are bad or all music is bad because you only listen to top 40 stations. There are more bad games being made than ever and there are also more good games being made than ever.
This is a overgeneralization of gaming that just looks at the very top film of "AAA" content, peer below and you see an actual microcosm of indie development and AA content being made by smaller dev groups and publishers as well as more international dev houses making games (A Space for the Unbound for instance is a banger game out of Indonesia). Don't expect a return to pre skinner box "AAA" content (whatever the fuck that once was), it won't happen.
Tldr: stop buying shit games and try out non mass market appeal games
Even when discounting indie games, Largely yes. There have been many great games in recent years that will be looked back on just as people look back at the "golden age" today. People are just forgetting all the horrible aspects of past generations, like the literal tons of garbage game released for the Atari or the tie-in license games which outnumber today's by a large margin. Hell, quite a few series that were floundering back then have been on a renaissance lately (Resident Evil, DOOM).
That said, I really miss when RTS games (aside from maybe Total War?) were still relevant.
I’d say objectively yes because there are more quality games releasing than ever before, especially ones that fill specific niches for people. Not to mention one has easier than ever access to play 40+ years of games pretty seamlessly, on PC at least.
On the other hand gaming sucks now because I’m old and miserable and everything was better in 2007. No one plays foolishly fast paced arena shooters anymore, I miss the people in my old WoW guild and opening new multiplayer game menus gives me sensory overload. So in that sense gaming is done basically
I've never been more spoilt for choice for good games to play. I always kinda wonder why people who actually just don't like games even play them tbh. Or even worse go out of their way to buy the worst games possible then complain all games bad and we must return to tradition or some shit.
to answer that question i would need to see the ratios of mecha games to total game releases over time. my ideal Large Map Long Range First Person Mecha Game has yet to be created. Titanfall 1 and 2 nailed the aesthetic but the gameplay was basically COD with double jumps, and larger-scale COD with no climbing when inside the mechs. i want something more like ARMA, with mechs that can go prone and lean (and maybe even dig trenches like infantry can in Enlisted) and with effective weapons ranges that are longer than the visible horizon. a 1990s tank should not be able to shoot farther than a huge mecha gun (i'm looking at you, mechwarrior series with your 900m max range '''long-range missiles''') also gimme some gosh darn mecha parkour, its wild that titanfall 1 and 2 focused so much on mobility for the pilot only for the titans to have their agility neutered to fit in the maps. in titanfall 2 there is a cutscene where your mech is climbing a mountain, i want to do that kind of thing in gameplay so badly. being able to navigate non-flat terrain is like, the entire and only advantage a mech might possibly have over other military vehicles. until that specific game is made gaming will be more or less irrelevant to me, an idle distraction full of annoying ads that i waste my time with until something better comes along.
(i'm looking at you, mechwarrior series with your 900m max range '''long-range missiles''')
Okay so a lot of the ranges come from Battletech, and the weapon ranges there in BT are mostly just for 'balance' reasons. Though it gets better, the in-universe reason why the weapon ranges are the way they are is because the battlemechs (and tanks, and everything else) have so much EW equipment as standard that it makes combat from out farther than the normal ranges a crapshoot, and pretty much the only people who can shoot out farther than normal ranges are typically named characters who are 0/0 gods amongst men (the typical mech/aero pilot is 4/5, 3/4 if they're a clanner, the lower the numbers, the better.). Though a lot of the novels stretch out what is standard range for the sake of better writing.
i kinda like the EW idea, i've only ever heard the 'fits on the tabletop' ranges excuse before, but its still a bit silly that the kind of missiles we currently use on trucks to attack things a state away suddenly shoot less far than the average infantry assault rifle, like if EW and active/passive defense was good enough that an Iskander or HIMARS could only shoot 900m effectively, we would stop using them in favor of some other weapon designed for those ranges in the first place, or use something that requires less EW capabilities like a direct fire cannon or dumb rocket. if there's passive defense that shoots down projectiles it would be cool to see that happen more often, but the AMS is fairly rare equipment in mechwarrior 5. i think some of the battletech lore clashes with the high tech clean angular aesthetic of the technology in battletech, like the mechs are ancient and passed down through generations in some cases with the original plans and factories lost forever, they should have like family markings and clan banners and custom retrofit parts and the like, but they kinda just look like futuristic (if kinda 80's retro) mass produced clean lines angular robots with the only customization coming in the form of paint jobs and which weapons you attach. the mech designs would make more sense to me in a more centralized, unified setting rather than the semi-feudal oligopoly in battletech.
Videogames have largely never been good, but they sure have gotten worse and you'd be a fool to think otherwise. Yeah sure capitalism is faster and faster draining all life from earth but that surely can't mean videogames or music is getting worse right??