Gaming Nostalgia Debate

Isn't this just older games that are popular vs newer games that weren't?

Actually I think your examples show that it is you who may be incorrect.Stardew Valley is 9 years old.Minecraft is almost 16 years old. The current version of the game has not dramatically changed in terms of the experience of most players of the game in over 10 years. (Hardcore players of any game will always make a big deal of any minor changes).I was born in the 1990’s. I was playing games regularly in the 2000’s and the 2010’s although I don’t play as much today.Hardly anyone in

Games these days are different to games "back in my day", of course.

You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.

These are all old games so I wouldn't be surprised either

Games aren't getting more shallow and casual. More likely you're just getting older and developing a preference for nostalgia over novelty.

A lot of these games aren't that old.

Video games are stagnating hard. I've basically quit gaming for like the past 5 years, playing maybe two graphically undemanding games to completion per year, and what I'm seeing is that it's the same old games that have remained popular. From my perspective as someone coming back, it's as if time had stood still. In fact, one of the games I played was initially released 10 years ago in early access.Bethesda even decided to just remake Oblivion rather than show off more of

A lot of new AAA titles are pretty superficial in comparison to 10 year older ones. That's why many people like to play older, or niche games.

Certainly people talk the most about the best games of a given generation, but I recently loaded up a 3ds with basically the top 50 games for it, then another 30 or so DS generation games, and so on down through GBA, GBC, SNES, NES... hundreds and hundreds of games I'm enjoying way more than some of the most played games of this generation e.g. Call of Duty or Fortnite.So not to be an old fart but I think previous generations really were spoiled by a much better on average library. Then