I made this comment on another thread, and honestly this cannot be stated enough how everything I’ve wrote down below is an accurate assessment of modern day gaming, younger generation gamers really should pay extra attention.
I started hardcore gaming at around 1978/9 and have played a significant amount of games over the decades, played virtually all the aRPGs, cRPGs, jRPGs, MMos etc etc etc. The issue right now if there has been a divergence in gaming which roughly happened around the 2013/2014 and I’ll get more into that later. Also remember some of the early games here were considered indie, they were written in peoples bedrooms and basements etc until some of the earliest studios formed.
Since the beginning of gaming, all games were complete - they had to be. Arcades become popular which sparked off ports to all the old systems and the market started growing until it crashed because a few publishers at the time, and some greedy developers suddenly realized this emerging market makes money and started to release basically garbage and shovelware which lead to the crash and you can thank Nintendo for basically saving the industry back then with the N.E.S - and the industry still hurting a bit after that humbling experience started to grow, and grow.
Things got a bit shaky again when the home consoles got so powerful they started to reach the same level of graphics and gameplay as the arcades such as the Ps1 era, and that lead to less and less people going to arcades which ultimately lead to that demise, which for over a decade had provided a source of easy games to port to systems for revenue, suddenly the developers and publishers had to step it up but still, games were “complete” they were in a finished state, they could be played start to finish without issues.
The home PC market was emerging with cheaper components and saw a significant increase in ownership, the internet started to become more and more popular too around this time, and that sprouted classics like Diablo, Command and Conquer, Doom/Quake the Ultima series etc etc etc, and guess what, still complete games and fast forward to the PS3 / Xbox 360 era through to modern day gaming
This is the era which saw the first divergence in gaming, because the internet had become so easily accessible with more and more features popping up on consoles, online stores…PS Home…this started the whole paid DLC, monetization, paid mods, early access and live service gaming. With developers turning into publishers and the focus shifting from making great games the players would enjoy into lets see how we can carve up the game into tiny slices for extra MONEY
Not to mention, as time progressed with Gen Xers, Millennials and Zoomers all entering the scene, GenX has seen everything and for the most part so have Millennials whilst Zoomers have not, they have not experienced games that don’t have microtransactions or PW2 aspects for example, so they rationalize it because they have been indoctrinated aka brainwashed into believing this is how all games are, or should be and its not - this is why modern gaming declines because this attitude sends clear messages to publishers to keep trying absolutely petty and obnoxious monetization tactics to get more and more money from you whilst delivering the absolute minimum product they think they can get away with and if you just put D4 aside for a second and look up all the gaming controversies over the past decade alone, you’ll see this pattern.
Monetization is the big issue here, Publishers would absolutely love to spin how this is so important, how necessary it is…no, no its not otherwise gaming would have died along time ago - its greed, because wall street clawed its way into the industry and the gamers are paying the price for it. The gaming industry nearly collapsed once and it could happen again, so the players must demand higher and higher quality instead of just settling otherwise, you’ll see more and more failures, more controversies and the industry very well could implode at some point because of it.
Your once gaming studio CEOs, managers etc all were coders and artists making great games, now steadily being replaced by hedge fund investors, wall street investors, bankers and people with significant money to use the industry, to make more money by any means necessary, at your expense - this is why modern day games suffer and these corporations that you white knight over are making you do their dirty work for them by defending bad/shady business practices and inferior products that could and should be better.