Every year became a competition, and it was unsustainable. Companies could spend millions on their presentation only to “lose” and get their reveals drowned out because Sony announced FF7 or Microsoft got Elder Scrolls etc. On all sides there was a rush to be the winner of the year, and it led to more and more CGI trailers of things 5+ years away just for the big reveal moment. I imagine both Sony and Microsoft would prefer to announce individual games as they come throughout the year, so their reveal is the only big gaming news of the week and everyone is talking about it.

Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They’ve cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I’m sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.

Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.

Lemmy doesn’t need to be #1 in popularity. I’d prefer it to split and maintain a higher level of quality, even if it’s smaller as a result. Even if Meta can grab data either way, it should be disconnected on principle.

My favourite memory is playing Freedom Unite solo, and finally reaching G rank on my own. It’s a tough game, and making it that far without being carried was the most satisfying moment in any game for me. When I first started Freedom 2 (the previous version) I struggled to hunt even basic small monsters, and looking back on that journey made the 200+ hour playtime completely worth it for me. I think G rank took another 100 on top of that lol.

It still feels weird to class the 360 era as retro, even though the launch is approaching 20 years ago. I’d say anything PS2/GC and earlier.

Separating the two sounds like it would make the problem a lot worse. Nobody would have a reason to create smaller duplicate communities anymore so things would end up centralised and easier to abuse, like what happened with Reddit. You could hop your account to a new instance, but doing so means nothing if there’s only one instance of the community.

Do you remember the genre or visuals at all? Like perspective, artstyle etc?

I’m new to lemmy so I might be wrong on this, but say if we have one big community for a certain hobby/interest and the moderators get power trippy or there are other problems, people into that hobby essentially have nowhere to go right? Having lots of smaller places and subscribing to them all makes it easier to cut one out and be less reliant on a specific group of people.

Agreed. I think Horizon and Days Gone are a reasonable price atm, but the rest are too expensive compared to their price on console.

I think games generally are improving, but AAA games mostly feel stagnant. It’s easy to look back at the best games of previous years, but gloss over the sea of low-effort licensed games and failed experiments. Games are more expensive than ever to make now, and that means there’s too much money involved to take big risks and gamble on experimental stuff. Big games by big publishers are forced to play it safe. The average experience has improved if you just picked a random game off the shelf 20 years ago vs now, but you don’t get as many of those spiked high points either.

Indie games are better than ever though. It’s so much easier now for indie devs to create and share games with the public, and that risk-taking mentality is still strong. The price creep of AAA games isn’t a thing, no season passes or battle passes or microtransactions, just games made by passionate players who wanted to scratch a certain itch missing in the market like you say.