I think there’s also a “Netflix effect” where old games are incresingly accessible as an alternative to newer crap, kinda like (from my personal observations) how a lot of young people seem to be really fluent in old movies and TV due to streaming and YT.
Its going to bite these publishers in the bum.
Indies I think helped younger gamers and old gamers become less impressed by graphics compared to the past. Gamers expect more and there’s many indies and old games people haven’t played.
There is also just tiny graphic improvements now, so for most people, 5 years old games look similar to what we have now
And that the requirements for those minimal improvements are vast. If you need to pull down 200GB for a minor graphical upgrade, that’s just not really worth it compared to an older game that is a bit graphically worse, but is both smaller, and runs better on newer hardware.
You can sort of tell by the whole 4k (or even 8k), 144Hz stuff that opportunities for real improvements have been running out for a while.
