GAMES ARE GETTING WORSE? not so fast...

if you see any speed run of any old game you see how broken they are, before we would just accept it and play

People really remember old games as being so much better than they where, so in comparison new ones don't seem as good. There is improvement to be made in terms of bugs and mechanics, and I would like to see them break the normal formulas. It's nice those changes seem to be starting now. The biggest reason for this though I'm sure is that game reviewers are dumb as hell. I've seen reviews in the past few years where I'm pretty sure that they never even played the game.

It's worth remembering that thirty years ago (yes, we had games even before the advent of Metacritic scores) the gamers were the very hardest hardcore gamers and since then the gaming market has commoditised and, with time, the number of hardcore gamers (by any definition) has been diluted. Reviewers are likely to be relatively harder core than the average but the more recent rise of the Wii and then of mobile gaming has created new markets that contain gamers that don't even read reviews... that is significant since it means that the reviewers are going to have plateau'd in their drop whereas the average gamer continues to be less and less hardcore. Add in that businesses are trying to sell as many units as possible and you can see why games are becoming easier and easier (not necessarily to complete, that doesn't help repeat spending, but easier to play); this brings down the difficulty of games as well and so breakout hits tend to happen on the indie side of things where the coders and their fans are (necessarily) much harder-core but also more innovative because they have smaller risks to deal with. So indie devs create the innovation and the hardcore hard games for the most part (Dark Souls is, of course, an exception) and the main area of business is currently console games which is giving way to mobile games... as the market continues to commoditise.

So the average gamer is indeed becoming less good at games and the games themselves are becoming less difficult, because a lot of the reviewers are internet based and not yet paid attention to by the new gamers (and at this point may never be since word of mouth is HUGE in mobile gaming) the "quality" of games, i.e. their scores are going to continue to descend _on average_.

HOWEVER, the number of excellent games will likely continue in absolute number and continue to descend in percentage. There is a chance that the absolute number of excellent games will rise for any individual player because the breadth of the market continues to expand and so the number of games in a particular genre will continue to increase to the point where you can play games all day, all week, all year in certain well established genres already, all of them good or excellent.

So the average numbers belie the fact that the market as a whole is becoming more and more specialised for all the gamers and so everyone wins :) - except those that care about productivity! :)

I agree with the basic points:
- Games are getting better on average
- Game critics and critiques are getting much more strict due to the higher number of games
- Games today tend to stick with the "I HAVE to make some money, so stick to the make a game similar to the normal for the genre", so we get very few risks taken in new IPs.

I think that games today tend to be less memorable compared to classic games (like the ones mentioned in the video) not due to lack of value, but due to similarity of other games. I mean, how many generic FPS games have been made. It's getting to the point that the different bench marks (Halo and COD) are literally beginning to mesh together making both of them less special. The biggest FPS as of late, Battlefield 1, has literally been re-hashing a historical war, where console FPS games kinda originated.
We're kinda getting to a point where there need's to be a new genre created to help diversify the game mechanics we are regularly seeing (something that many were hoping VR may accomplish to some degree)

gj calling out Skies of Arcadia. it gets so little recognition. love that game.   

As for games getting worse... it's kind of a mixed back. But it's true that the cash-grabbyness of big games is far more... apparent than every before, and it devalues the experience.