One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.
In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:
- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games
- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games
- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games
Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O
Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.
All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm.
Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films.
My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.