If you have 0 standards.
Depends on how you define high quality, indie games with quality similar to Hollow Knight do not come out all the time.
It just is much harder to have that level of polish and amount of content without a bigger well oiled team, so almost no indie games reaches that level.
No film, no music, no game.
There's good, but there is no truly magnificent to the level I burst into tears and see the face of God.
Come on people. Your standards are too low.
Producing things of value takes a lot of time and effort, you would be too busy to waste time lamenting about things outside of your control.
But not finding joy in anything is an actual sign of depression. Have some media standards declined? Yes, definitely. But by no means is literally everything bad now. You can still find plenty of non-formulaic media on streaming services.
Moving to something else that provides joy is a sign of healthy life, not depression. If you don't like modern media, you don't have to find some that you like, you can look somewhere else, in a completely different area.
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
Even if you take an old established media, like literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30.
Saying that about gaming industry, which is barely 50 year old, is a joke.
One can only say that when they no idea what "high standards" actually means.
I don't think this is true, at least not for an ordinary person, unless you're dedicating your life to it (hardly trivial) or ploughing your way through for the sake of completion rather than absorbing them intellectually and emotionally. Writers like Joyce can be difficult to even parse if you're trying to read their work quickly, and to truly understand it you'll probably need to engage with secondary sources. And then there's the likes of Proust, which aren't exactly difficult to read but are extremely long (and probably won't do much for you unless you take your time with them). There's no objectively valid set of 'classics' but we're talking about certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of books. A book a week every single week from the age of 15-30 would do it if we're taking about a medium-sized set of classics...
Some time ago I started playing all the games that to me felt worthwhile to play in roughly chronological order.
I think the project is overall quite different than "reading all the classics" though - a lot of old games have aged pretty poorly so I can either skip them or abandon after giving them a fair shot.
I'm currently roughly in the 2000-2010 era of games. (It's not pure chronological, because I tend to sort play order by console, then by series, then by year.)
Or spend a lifetime reading and re-reading them non-trivially.
"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with 'a varied and interesting background.' It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure."
- Gene Wolfe
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
Ever bothered to actually go through the "all new releases" list on steam and actually check each new release? You should try it.
99% of "stuff" there is worthless trash, think 0 effort assetflip, which is never going to make $100 steam tax back. 1% is barely passable, as in "not a blatant insult to consumer". Unique stuff worth playing is extremely rare, if you're not 7 years old and you played more than a couple of games in your life of course.
This is a hot take indeed. Unless you use the word unique to pick only a single game from each genre, even a single genre has more games than I can hope to finish in a lifetime.
I mean, I still play Dune 2, warcraft II, sc:broodwars and C&C, in addition to Starcraft II.
And that's just a single genre.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has played as many games as I have, and I couldn't disagree more. I find this sentiment more common amongst people who have played 20-30 games in their lifetime. The more I play, the more interested I am in the smaller titles sprinkled throughout the month. Even a janky, low budget game can do something unique. I have a massive backlog.
There are very cool games coming out every week, IMO. Just this next month,
- The Kingsfield inspired game Queen's Domain. That looks visually amazing.
- Noble Fates is a very cool Colony Sim that surpasses Rimworld in some respects (even if it comes short in others)
- Worship is a game where you play as a cult leader and command minions like Pikmin (I'm a sucker for cult games).
- County of Fortune is a massive city builder that goes a scale beyond what most city builders allow
- Silver Pines is a horror game borrowing from the genre's greats. It got a 97% on Steam.
But I suppose that's part of the problem with all media. We have more media than ever, so tastes get more divserse. This can consequently be bad for "cultural" purposes because you can meet 1000 people and struggle to find more than 2 who like the kinds of games or movies you watch regularly. So you instead default back 20 years ago to The Wire or Sopranos or The Dark Knight Rises, etc. Around the last time we have "mass culture". or Sports.
For gaming, GTA VI will be an interesting time, even if I don't personally care for the series. Because that may be the first time since perhaps Pokemon GO where you have so many subgroups of gaming aligning together for a single release.