As Sony and Microsoft do seemingly everything in their power to upset veteran gamers, one reader says they’ve had enough and are turning their back on the current generation.
As a long-term gamer who has been playing since I was old enough to reach the joystick on an arcade machine, and someone who has been reading the Metro for as long as it’s been around, I have always very much enjoyed diving into the commentary around gaming over the years.
Having even dropped in a few of my own Reader’s Features in the past, I’ve spent a lot of time recently just sitting back and reading the room on the current state of the games industry. But right now, I felt it was time to put pen to paper once again. At 49, I find myself starting to reflect on what gaming has actually given me over the decades, and how drastically things have shifted.
Take a look at the modern gaming landscape right now – especially when you see cynical, Fortnite-chasing clones like the recently revealed Horizon Hunters Gathering – and it’s hard not to feel completely exhausted by it all. There is a massive generational chasm opening up in gaming, and the executives in charge seem entirely oblivious to it.
The divide is pretty simple. There is a whole generation of us who remember when games actually had intent, soul, and a bit of creative spark. We remember the Capcom standard of the 90s and early noughties. Back when I was a teenager, dropping coins into Street Fighter 2 cabinets or getting into the very first Monster Hunter, the developers weren’t just chasing the latest zeitgeist; they were writing the rules. You bought a cartridge or a disc, and that was it – a complete, fully featured experience. You wanted the best stuff? You actually had to play the game and get good at it.
Things started to really go wrong around the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 era. What kicked off with that infamous horse armour DLC has mutated into this vacuous, corporate treadmill of live service models, microtransactions, and endless loot boxes.
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The real tragedy is that the younger generation – the kids born with tablets practically glued to their hands – have absolutely no idea what they’ve lost. They’ve been essentially indoctrinated by a manufactured ecosystem. To them, a game isn’t a self-contained piece of art; it’s a digital storefront that actively penalises you if you don’t log in every single day. They don’t even question why a title ships half-finished or why they’re expected to cough up extra cash for basic features. This saccharine, corporate greed is the only version of the hobby they’ve ever known.
But a lot of us older players are finally hitting the brakes. As we become acutely aware of what’s next, whether it’s the eye-watering price of the newly released Steam Machine or the looming prospect of a PlayStation 6 and whatever Microsoft has planned pushing prices to absurd heights. I am simply noping out of it all. It is just too expensive, and frankly, I am not the target audience anymore.
With these spiralling hardware costs and the actual leaps in photorealism giving us diminishing returns, those of us who know better are just walking away. We’re diving backwards into the absolute gold mine of retro gaming. We’re embracing things like the return of the Neo Geo and investing in physical media that actually belongs to us – no server handshakes required. We just want self-contained experiences we can actually finish and put proudly on a shelf.
It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom when you’re staring straight into the abyss of this corporate, digital-only future. But if we just stop for a second and look backwards, the whole picture changes. You see an era overflowing with joy, boundless creativity, and genuine art.
There is so much to be thankful for in the history of this medium. We don’t have to follow the corporate machine into the dark; we can choose to turn around and celebrate the masterpieces that are already waiting for us.
By reader Bristol Pete
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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