I’m no gamedev, but as a consumer, my impression is that this itch happens because of where the person asked usually looks to.

The way I see it, games, much like all other segments of entertainment, can be divided into big productions and smaller productions.

Those productions are usually accompanied by proportionally big or small companies.

From what I can observe, bigger companies get where they are because they made something no one expected but that worked great. But then, a paradox forms, they get so big that perhaps they’re too afraid too fail. After all, the higher you get, the higher you fall. And so, in fear of failing, instead of daring, and thus being innovative, they stick to the same formula that got them where they are, over and over, trying to keep momentum. This lack of innovation, added with the tactic of selling hype instead of actual contents, feels extremely wearing.

Meanwhile, the smaller companies don’t have this leash that is being too big and needing to keep momentum, meaning they have more room to dare being different.

Surely, there are many indie projects that leave to be desired, but the impression I get is that the amount of indie games that get good reception, as well as how good this reception is, usually end up being of a much higher order than those shiny AAA games that are made to sell consoles.

And with those points in mind, I go back to the first phrase of those considerations of mine by pondering if perhaps the people you asked to aren’t biased by seeing/consuming too much of those games whose companies are trying to maintain the status quo.

Now, what was my favorite console generation, you ask? None. But I do have one console that I love far more than the others, the PlayStation Vita.

“How heinous!” / “This console has no exclusives!” / “It launched dead!”

This is no joke and I’ll explain why.

Starting with the SNES up until recently, I was always 1~2 generations behind everyone else, so I could see very well how the landscape for gaming on a given console was after the dust settled in.

The SNES was nice but I didn’t play much of it at the time. The PS2 had great and unique games a la carte (I’m still finding good games to this day tbh). The PS3 started feeling same-y, with too much glitter and too little contents in most games I could find. And the Vita’s catalogue is a salad due to Sony supporting it for some time (long enough to have some bigger IPs in it), indie developers supporting it long after Sony dropped support (even modding in the Vita is mostly just “made a wrapper to run x or y game on the console”), and it supporting by design the PSP and, by extension, the PS1, made it so games could be picked at random without any specific luring you more than the others. And upon picking many games at random, this degradation I described before became more and more palpable.

The Vita is my favorite console because it has no consistency in its catalogue. And this lack of consistency lets me find just so much stuff that is genuinely good. To me, a device blessed by its curse.

So yeah, I think the entertainment industry feels stale because the bigger projects, the ones that are usually seem first, are stale, while the smaller projects can still thrive. But as they say, the first impression is a lasting impression, so if what the person sees first are games that staling in quality, their views on gaming overall may be tainted.