You're not just getting old.

The rise of the internet fucked up gaming because it allowed game companies to control the software and insert
all sorts of abusive monetization inside it.

The internet allowed game theft by EA, activision and Valve. It began with mmo's in the late 90's to take control of software out of the publics hand.

That is why gaming is such a clusterfuck, and why AAA gaming went to shit. High speed internet allowed game companies to take game functionality hostage, dedicated servers and level editors had to be massively scaled back to sell lootboxes and microtransactions.

Go loadup any popular mobile game like Final fantasy brave exvious or Fate grand order.

Single player games under the mainframe dumb client model. AKA they can now force kids to play games as publishers want because they control the values from their servers.

That was their wet dream since the late 90's. The fact that drm, world of warcaft, uo, and Team fortress 2 and League of legends even exist means the average gamer is retarded.

To watch so called "hackers" on hackernews fall all overthemselves to give up software ownership and eat drm in windows 10 was a far cry from the nerds of the 90's. We who remember palladium and wanted to keep control over our PC games because we knew the evil empire was coming to steal our PC games to get rid of dedicated servers, level editors, etc.

But the masses got internet and their stupid consumer behavior fucked up gaming.

All major franchises from the 90's got turned into mainframe - dumb client models.

Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3
Tribes vs Tribes ascend
Mechwarrior 1-4 vs Mech warrior online

The game industry gloats about it's great victory to server lock every new big budget game going forward on businss sites.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...

So no mass invasion's of privacy, stealing PC games via splitting the local application into two and selling it to the gullible masses as mmo' and "software as a service" / always online drm. Meant that the money men could now control the game from end to end.

Which is why gaming went to shit.

The internet radically altered the power between game buyer and game producer. When game companies can literally steal software by merely holding onto part of the software they produce in an internet enabled society, you know you are no longer in kansas anymore toto.

The shit the nerds of the 90's feared game true as the dumb masses ate up all the corporate PR to take over PC's and turn them into dumb terminals through slowly boiling the frog over decades and raising a new generation of gamers that don't are or don't know about the golden age of the 90's.

It was a golden age for a reason - the incentives were to produce good games, it was a "by gamers, for gamers" era, aka nerds producing games for other nerds.

When gaming went mainstream in the 2000's, everything got dumbed down to chimp level. We went from 8 or so weapons in quake to two in Halo 1 as bungie got bought out by microsoft.

Most PC developers entered the MMO space or jumped ship to make console games and there was a dry decade in PC gaming until it started back up in early 2008-2009 as a new generation of kids got internet and came online, leauge of legends hit and the most exploitive model became the most successful - take control of the game via mainframe-server, and sell flags to display skins to technology illiterate gamers.

To go from something like warcraft 3 to lol and dota is pretty much dystopian. There's no incentive not to make gmaes like the 90's where you got singleplaer campaign+multiplayr + level editors in the AAA space.

The microtransactions in the latest Ubisofts games are abhorrent and the non moddability of games like The Crew or For honor speak volumes about the locked down nature of modern AAA space.

So yeah gaming did go downhill - the internet allowed game companies to take control of the game software which means they can no infect it with all sorts of anti-fun game design.

That was the difference between pre mass internet penetration and after the internet hit the gaming masses.

Night and day.