>>138348
I agree with most of this, except the variety argument. Between mods, demo CDs and random freeware, plus the odd indie worth something, there was a lot more variety before, including because devs were still working on projects based on things they liked. Think dwarf fortress, ss13, original dota (the warcraft3 mod), team fortress (the quake mod?), spiderweb software games, things like elona, various rpgmaker crapware, etc.

In the online game space there were all kinds of mid budget stuff, especially from korean companies, like gunz or tricksters online, that often had some pretty interesting gimmicks or totally different mechanics than what the bigger names were proposing.

Now everyone (not just in gaems) is putting profit and "data-driven" bullshit first, everything (including fun, the point of a game) second. This includes indies, of course. Everything is derivative. The only reason for all these building games was dwarf fortress becoming more known in public spaces. Amongus is a simplified ripoff of the ss13 concept. Even minecraft is a ripoff of many previous publicly available 'game experiments', notoriously infiniminer. Cult of the lamb is a bad clone of binding of isaac, stardew valley is a 1:1 clone of, specifically, rune factory 3 (with added contents of course, but everything down to the special effect design and running physics were copied straight up), etc.

It's true that there was a big '2deep4u' movements and a walking simulator movement some time ago. But those movements came off of 'follow-the-leader' kind of sheep behavior, just like today it's crafting games, roguelites, and "life" games. There is, if anything, less variety than ever while I tried many indies and even had a minute of shallow fun here and there, overall, the last time I played a game I could say was truly 'good' (not even necessarily great) was in 2007. Indies now also too often are 1 hour long at best, and still commonly retail at ridiculous prices in the $20-$40 range, even for early access crap that will never be further developed.

I'm not even a particularly weird audience and I like an eclectic set of games. Jak & daxter (the first only), various MMOs like tricksters and dofus (I can even enjoy things like FlyFF and age of wushu), autistic games like dwarf fortress or the ss13 servers with more extensive mechanics, tRPGs like FFTA, jRPGs like Dragon Warrior 1, roguelites like crypt of the necrodancer, TW1, 2 to a lesser extent, early bioware games...
And there isn't a single game for me in the market. Not a single MMO left (only pservers, which are fun for a bit, but the point of MMOs is large groups, which doesn't happen much in pservers; everything else turned into a single player online game with random people showing up, but you never need or want to interact with them, by design. Auto-queues, auction houses, solo-friendly contents everywhere...). The few tRPGs that exist are extremely low-effort crap for people who don't play games. I can't think of a single classic jRPG getting advertised. Platformers? Performative at best, e.g. that political hat game or the shitty banjo-kazooie "spiritual successor" that bombed. Classic RPGs? LOL.

Years ago there was an AAA company showing a game. It was a top-view map with tactical stuff. I thought "oh? That looks cool, some kind of rts maybe?'. Then the audience starts laughing. The presenter smiles and moves to the next video. It was just a joke, actually they were presenting a "tactical" FPS (aka yet another COD clone) and they were making fun of people who like "dumb boring shit" like that over "epic action! Explosions! WOW!".

It really sunk in then that good games were never coming back.

But it's the same thing in indie games.

My favorite game is Ultima VII by the way. And you???