So much consolidation in the last decade means that the majority of the by AAA game devs are owned by like 2-3 companies at this point. It's horrendous.

Like Activision used to be the nicest publisher. Then it merged with Blizzard and Vivendi (who owned Bethesda), and then Microsoft just straight up bought them, and King (candy crush dev). And now MS wants almost nothing to do with games after doing fuck all with those acquisitions except laying people off and closing some of the studios.

The majority of games made by the gaming industry exist purely to create profit.

This is not the artist and developers fault, they are still passionate but their hands are tied to executive whims.

It’s genuinely almost all shit. The only good games left are indie games and older gems.

Honestly way cheaper and not requiring the latest hardware either.

I wish I could blame it all on these kinds of people. In reality it's about 60% of the story or so. They've always been around but they weren't this bold a decade ago.

A small part is the political climate over the last decade. That's a topic worth its own encyclopedia one day, and games is affected as well.

A large part is that games just isn't doing well financially right now. Because everyone in tech wants to invest in AI so there's a lot less money in the space. Smaller or medium sized teams can't get funding and less pitches get approved. Larger studios are "fine" but companies are using this time to cash out. Which is why you hear about Activision selling out to Microsoft and EA to Saudi Arabia. Layoffs at small companies happen because they need to (or companies simply shut down) , layoffs at large companies happen to make the number go up.

Last decent chunk of the problem is the landscape of games is changing. Converging more on "forever games" rather than traditional console experiences. This is an emerging problem that will get worse over the coming years, something even the consoles themselves are trying to shape itself around.