Anon blames millennials

It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.
- No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry in our twenties. Right... lol.
- Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
  
  I'm aware this was sarcasm, but want to point out Asmongold is a Nazi sympathizer. No idea who the other person is.
- Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
  
  Institutional money didn't take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
  
  That's why most of the money hungry games were in the arcades back then. PC gaming wasn't nearly as big.

The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
- I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
  
  The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
  
  The old ones, yes
  
  They're Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80's, maybe late 70's). Or do they qualify as another generation ?
- I was about to say the same, most management is still gen x, even boomers (fucking retire please). Some low level managers are millennials, but these are not the people calling the shots. As usual, money hoarders make decisions, and you can accuse us millennials of a lot of things but having any money on us.
  You might want to look, as usual, to indie millennial game devs. There you will see how we call the shots. We are nowhere that good as gen x indies, but we have our thing.

The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every "generation" after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.
When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.
I'm fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn't mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn't matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.

Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you're incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don't factor in as much for them.
Just like game design, it's an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).
- tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
  
  Unlike most "everything"s out there, games are doing great. Ignore shovelware and corpo schlock, some of the best games ever made have come out in the past few years. Genres get pushed, art gets made, phenomenal brain-off gameplay loops are polished, stories get told. Which world is better:
  4 good games come out every year but it's Nintendo and co making them. Also 100k bad games come out every year.
  10 good games come out every year. Nintendo and Ubisoft and Sony churn out 29 shareholder revenue generators. There are nine million AI asset flip cash grabs and porn VNs released that year. People are paying 20,000 dollars a month for catgirl jpgs on their gambling phone games.
  Who cares about "ratio" of good to schlock? You were never gonna play it all anyway. The last couple years alone saw everything from Balatro to Caves of Qud to Blue Prince.
  
  The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
  
  ^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it's important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one's mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you "my ideas are always good no matter what others think" after these successes, even when that's not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It's important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.
  
  Not that I disagree with you but it's more like greed ruins everything
  
  Capitalism doesn't ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
- I'm just so sad that it seems most execs in the field go play tennis or golf after work and think videogames are for losers. there is a lot of contempt and expectation that losers will just forever dish out money. if it wasn't for this strange phenomenon that game engines are so available nowadays, we would be screwed. thank god for the indie space
  
  Tbf most gamers are, indeed, losers.
- Gamers gamify a system that can be gamed. More at 11.

The gaming industry is fine. It's all the AAA publishers that are shit.

Indie gaming is the best it's ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.
- Yeah, as far as I'm concerned most AAA games might as well be part of a totally separate hobby that I don't pay much attention to.
  Also the craft of game-making has improved, so that even an average modern game is in many ways better than the best games from 25 years ago. For example, consider Diablo II. I played the remake a lot and large parts were as good as I remembered but what really stuck out to me was how boring the boss battles are. The height of skill is running in a circle around Diablo when he does his lightning hose attack. It's far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II's mistakes.
  Diablo II blew my mind in 2000 in a way that a better ARPG wouldn't today, but that doesn't mean that games have gotten worse. It means that I have gotten used to playing great games.
  
  It's far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II's mistakes.
  I was ready to argue you at the start of the sentence and then went completely agreeing with you. New games aren't better because they are new, but they have a potential to become better by learning about what worked good or bad in previous games. And it doesn't make classics look bad now, like, we don't need to fix Chess for how wild the horsey is in it, but coming to any old game requires setting oneself into the context of when it was launched, and therefore we need to see any new game through the lense of past experinces and how they learnt on mistakes of the past instead of repeating them.
  
  I’ve had a similar experience.
  For me it was more accessibility issues like timely checkpoints and not forcing the player to button mash.
  I realized that a lot of my childhood gaming was possible because I just put up with gaming mechanics that need a lot of time and patience.
  The past: don’t know what to do? Spend an hour just trying things and if that doesn’t work, try again tomorrow.
  Today: don’t know what to do? This game has half an hour to give me a hint or I’m moving on to the next game cause I’m here to have fun damn it!
- I seriously have nothing to say to anyone who doesn't see it that way. If all you play is big budget corpo horseshit and your first instinct is to blame a generational cohort, that says more about you.
  
  AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
  Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
- AAA games are made by companies that have boomers and early gen x in charge
  Indie games are more likely to be made by people actually doing the development, i.e. millennials & early gen Z currently
  Indie games have been having a great decade, AAA keeps getting worse
  Thanks for attending my TED talk
- AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.
- Indie gaming now is great for players, but for gamedevs it is a saturated market and most of them don't make a profit
- And also, the rate of good AAA games coming out is still the same, it's just they're drowning by the see of identical boring cashgrabs.
  It's the same with all the other media, cool shit is still there, you just have to learn to filter the bullshit out.

That has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. They basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.
- When it was released in 1993, Doom — which was developed for under $1M USD — was earning id software $100k/day immediately upon release, in shareware registrations alone.
  It's no wonder capitalist leeches saw those returns and wanted to insert themselves in the process. Of course the more who latch on, the more value they need to extract by screwing over both the devs and the players.
  Obviously the devs and players are actually the only two groups who are necessary in this relationship, and they're the ones getting soaked.
  PS by "devs" I mean anyone who works on the game to make it better.
- It's mobile games. It has always been mobile games.
  A large part of the population is simply unwilling to treat games as a medium that requires quick reactions, precision and thinking. To them, gaming more like spinning slots in a casino. Until about 2012, these people didn't realize such games existed on consoles or the PC, so we were safe. Eventually mobile app stores tapped into this massive market, got enormous returns and made everyone else realize how many people were willing to engage with a glorified skinner box.
  Every fiscally responsible company now has to assess the degree of implementing these dogshit gameplay loops, instead of just not doing that like they used to.
  The only AAA games safe from this are the ones that are extremely hard (complex) as a baseline. Stuff like Path Of Exile and Elden Ring.
  
  The company I work for recently tried to make a mobile game, being a fairly informal studio with many gamers on staff we made something more like a mini linear rpg than a typical mobile game. Testers loved it but the publisher said it was too complicated for mobile and cancelled on us.
  
  I don’t think that is true at all.
  Strategy games existed, adventure and point and click existed, puzzles, turn based rpg, even forgiving platformers existed since before PC gaming, and flourished with PC gaming. Many of the hits needed nothing of that.
  Many of the hits today still need all of that and are competitive.
  The market grew, and with it came more audience and genres.
  If we all liked yellow, what would happen to blue?
- Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.

The ruin of modern games is the perfect shit storm of:
The quest for the other side of the uncanny valley, making releases closer to decades
The death of the in-house game engine.
The half-baked attempt to cross-platform consoles with PCs
The half-baked attempt to cross-platform mobile devices with consoles
The merger of Live Service Games and Free to Play
Game prices not following inflation.
Everyone and their brother trying to take a major cut.
Shit is more complex and resource intensive than it has ever been, we're hardly even looking to optimize these days if it works.
You get to choose from a couple of engines, who want a serious cut, or a free engine who has serious problems on consoles.
You need the game not only to pay for itself in sales, but in in-game sales without making it to gambley or making it too pay to win.
Adjusted for inflation, Mario Odyssey is $20 less at launch than E.T. was at launch for the atari.

Most definitely can be refuted. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of amazing games out there made by young and old people that appeal to both young and old people. The issue Anon is struggling with is non gamer capitalists running game companies and milking games for every last penny at the cost of quality.
I know it's a tired example, but look at the company and team responsible for BG3. A game that is widely considered one of the greatest games to be realsed in at least the last 10 years, maybe even longer. This game was made by a company owned and operated by old people and young people. The teams directing, designing, creating, and writing this game were made up of multiple generations of people, and what was made, unimpacted by corporate greed, was a masterpiece.
Good games are products of passion and creative freedom, not money or age.
- There'more great games now then ever there ever was. So many choices. Plus, the older games didn't disapear and there is no such thing as "the Golden Age of gaming" lol. It's just that a bunch of low- losers are spending their days on the internet crying about "woke runing my videagame" because they see a woman not having huge boobs and a bikini armor.
- Im currently enjoying there Blue Prince.
  There's nothing else like it, it's challenging, and cozy.
  If you like playing detective, and bring patience and like exploring and taking notes instead of hyper-focusing on one goal, it's tens of hours of fun.
  
  I've been playing this, too! It's a great game!
  
  Only thing I don't really like about it is the drafting mechanic. I hit a lot of "ooh! I think I know how to solve that puzzle!" or "Ooh, I think I vaguely remember something in that one room that I didn't screenshot at the time but I'm pretty sure was a clue for the puzzle I just discovered!" only to never see the relevant room(s) in a bunch of runs. Hell, I'm pretty sure based on a clue that there's some kind of clock room (if it's just the den, I have no idea how to figure it out so I'm assuming there's another clock room) I haven't seen yet at all dozens of days in, another related puzzle that requires I draft a whole bunch of related rooms that I never get enough of (unless I'm on a wrong line of thought about that) and a third related to the other two where AFAIK I'm waiting on a random item drop and the room to use it in to appear in the same run.
  Even something like being able to curate the deck more than the conservatory allows would be tremendous.

Gaming hasn't gone to shit.
Some of it is shit, but that's true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.
Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn't align with reality.
- I think the main difference is that we mostly forget about the shovelware titles of 20 years ago. Meanwhile the predatory monetization practices of the popular kids games of this current era will not be forgotten.
  You can’t say that gaming is better now when Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Roblox are the most popular games for an entire gaming generation. There are still masterpieces being made today and there was plenty of shovelware back then but there will never be another year for gaming like 1998.
  You get like 3 games worth playing a year now and studios that would make all timers year after year now release a game once a decade and sell micro transactions or 50,000 ports of it.
  
  Obviously I don't know your personal situation, but they can't actually force you to play Roblox. You're allowed to say no.
  Joking aside, the existence of bad games doesn't make gaming worse when there are great games still being made. ET doesn't count against Super Mario Bros. just because they were released in the same decade. Superman 64 doesn't count against Ocarina of Time just because they were a year apart. And Fortnite being released eight years ago definitely doesn't count against gaming today just because people are still playing it.
  Yeah 1998 had some great games. A couple of them even hold up today. But not many, and the biggest reason those games topped the charts back then was because gaming as a whole was like 1% of the size it is today.
  If you can't find more than three games worth playing in a year, then either you don't like games that much, or you're not looking.
  
  I'd agree with the 3 games worth playing a year comment if you limit it to bigger budget games and anything new over $50. But indie games and games that are around $20-40 at launch. Naw, you need to raise that number significantly or expand beyond a single genre.
- Right, and let's not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.

Obligatory:
No war but class war.

Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there's probably like 15 games that fit this category.
Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they're going to get fucked. Its really simple.
- I agree. There is a lot of great content for reasonable prices and a lot of terrible content for high prices. It's a thriving industry. We just need to be intentional about our purchasing decisions.
- I almost never pay more than 5$ for a game, get the free game from epic each week since last year, and I have hundreds of amazing games in my livrary. I litteraly could stop working and play super fun games 24/7 for the next 2-3 years without spending a dime. Up to a last year, I was litteraly playing on an overclocked i5 750 (16 y/o cpu) with a 1060i gpu, and can't think of a game that wasn't playable. I even worked on a small VR project on that computer lol.

STOP blaming age groups! It’s a divide and conquer tactic. It’s not your parent’s fault. It’s not your grandparent’s fault. It is the fault of the rising Oligarchy Super Wealthy. Their system works when we work against each other. We’re even suspicious and blame our parents and grandparents these days. WTF??
- Ironically they blame their own children too

As a millienial software dev:
Imo: What happened is twofold:
The business grads also played games, and saw the money to be made.
The best devs are smart enough to *not work in AAA Gamedev.
- I phone screened for a game dev position. The ad said about half my salary. It was going to be a big sacrifice. Then on the phone screen they said 10k less than that.
  When I sounded concerned about money, I think that killed my chances. "Tell me more about this profit sharing" was almost certainly the end. It was for the best.
- Which is depressing as hell. I considered switching to game dev (since anyway want to change my stack and language), then realised that would be sacrificing too much for too little and abandoned the idea. I will have a better time making money doing something else and playing in free time than diving into this madness that does not even pay adequately in pursuit of the off-chance of getting to work on something great
- MBA = Megalomaniacsl Bastard Accountant
  (with the fun bonus of almost no actual math required!)
  
  MBAs, cause we gotta justify nepotism hires somehow.

I mean, kind of, but not really.
It all started with Halo. Back in the late 90s and early 00s the movie industry was the big money maker of entertainment and there was actually a lot of anti-gaming rhetoric in news and politics. The weekend Halo 3 released it was so popular that it disrupted the box office numbers for a couple of movies. The movie executives decided to stop trying to kill the gaming industry and take it over instead.
So I guess you can blame millennials for playing Halo instead of going to the movies that weekend.
- It's the same in every industry. Rich shit bags move in and buy successful entities but have no idea how to run them. They slowly get shittier, so good employees move on and do their own thing.
  There's still amazing games being made, there's just a lot more shit games you have to sift though. Follow great game devs, not who they work for.
  
  Yeah, the industry seems to be changing again. There's a push towards passion projects and those projects are seeing more success than the big budget games. I think we will either see a new cycle of conglomeration or, hopefully, we will see the executives take a more hands-off approach and let the games make money for them.
  Just because you own a sports team doesn't mean you should be head coach.
- A movie when I was a teenager was $3.25 for a matinee. Also, there were like barely any mass shootings. America is imploding. All these issues people bring up the outliers and they never want to talk about the root causes because it's a contentious arena. Capitalism consumes itself until there's nothing left and the wealth is all consolidated at the top horded and then World War. The cycle continues. Everything's connected. Nothing in a capitalist society happens without money. If we want to understand the differences of then and now we would focus on the economy. I hate gaming of today. There are advances, but all I see is cigar chopping game execs as they pray on nostalgic millennials and children. I can't even watch movies anymore because all I see is propaganda, mischaracterization, and the profit motive. All I see is rich people trying to mold your minds and destroy education and keep you hyper-distracted with short-term goals. It's not that technology is evil, but anytime the Imperialist come up with some kind of new gizmo, it's always a double-edged sword. I know people will think I'm overreacting, but I'm not. Once you realize how real life is, and all the mechanisms that go on around you, you start thinking about things differently. You change your behavior. Pearls before swine.
  
  I've always found it deeply insulting.
  
  You're not wrong

Frank Zappa ideas; paraphrased by me.
In the 1960's the music execs like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and had no idea what the kids wanted. They just threw money at the problem and gave contracts to anyone. The result was a vast variety, everything from Sha-Na-Na to the Mamas and the Papas to Iron Butterfly. When the next generation of bosses got hired, they looked at the one consistent moneymaker; Motown Records. Everyone at Motown had a similar look and singing style...
- Oh man. Iron butterfly is just...
  I have no words. They're very special to me
  
  https://youtu.be/J9HtU2IKOfU

It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
- Holy shit, it was Microsoft. Microsoft ruined gaming.
  
  Bethesda pioneered MTX with horse armor long before MS bought them.
  EA and Valve pioneered in game ads and loot boxes.
- Horse armor.
- Nailed it. When casino and packaged goods marketers and executives started malignantly metastasizing into the games industry.

Mobile and fast broadband internet is what ruined gaming. Back in the day, it was impossible to download a game very reliably plus it was super slow if you tried. It was far easier to go to a store and buy the disks.
Mobile showed that there is an enormous crowd of extremely stupid people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at adolescent half baked code and that the best retention and monetization is often with junk that is never fixed or is even broken worse over time. That standardized garbage and flooded the space with loads of slop. Just sorting through the slop is a chore now and fools have proven that it is profitable to take a giant shit of slop and dump it on everyone to let people pay their way through searching for undigested corn kernels in these places. The same is true of streaming. You pay for it to waste your time. You lower your expectations, and the cycle continues. It is profitable to target the stupidest people. Culturally, it will require the majority to stop being brain dead zombies, but good luck with that. We're both zombies on an idiot brick right now.
- I'd argue management ruined gaming but broadband and mobile enabled it.
  People are making these choices.

There's plenty of great games these days. The "golden age" wasn't because of the quality of games. It was because I was able to delve into them deeply and enjoy them without all the concerns of my adult life running on the back of my mind pulling me out of it.

Zoomer consumers accepting micro transactions in games

I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.

I don't know, games are getting really good these days. If you ignore the aaaaaaa slop you're going to find some awesome stuff

Wait, gaming is shit now and it was great in the past?
I agree about the speed of progress, but someone is forgetting all the movie games on the ps2 (looking at you cat woman).
Also, I’m old enough to remember the angry video game nerd reviewing bad NES games, holy shit, you have no idea how bad it can get.
- Yeah, this seems like a case of survivorship bias and the fact that there are way more games coming out in the modern age.
- There should be a list of actually good movie tie-in games. There's probably like 20 of em and 2 of them are LOTR.
  
  The LOTR games were so good!
  
  Riddick has a good one, and I remember enjoying Shrek 2 on the 6th gen consoles.
- Rockstar made GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the PS2 generation. We are 5 years into this current generation and Rockstar has made 0 total games for PS5.
  Yeah there was a lot of shovelware back then. We get barely anything now.
  
  Yeah if you only look at Triple A then it looks barren. But small and indie studios have filled that vacuum.
- Movie tin-in games that end up being utter pieces of shit date back to the Atari 2600. The USA videogame crash was caused by ET, of all things.

Hollow Knight (Silksong soon^TM)
Stardew Valley
Factorio
Outer Wilds
Baldur's Gate 3
Clair Obscur
Gaming is fucking phenomenal right now, OP is looking in the wrong direction.
- Games made by gamers vs corporations are two different worlds indeed

It is the money people's fault. Once there was money to be had in the industry, all the idiots moved in, and no power can resist them. The game devs hate making awful cash-grab games that aren't fun to play, too.
- Then they have the marketing team, that tell you it is fun to play and they make sure you will see the game everywhere, you dont want to miss out on this hype right?!
  
  What, don't you want to play "Kane and Lynch: Dog Days 2" just because we turned the entire fucking subway car into an advertisement for it?
  It feels like the Mariachi band that only goes away when you pay them. If you don't buy it, we're going to have to buy space on your living room wall and put a speaker in there to play ads for it, so fucking buy it you dummy, you don't have a choice.

The golden age of games, also happened to have publishers who were just that, publishers, not slave drivers commanding the market and shutting down studios every time they sneezed.

Nah, not really, it's only shit if you only play AAA suit-driven slop. There's a ton of awesome games being released and the older ones are still there to (re) play.

It's the system slowly and successfully corroding your class conscience, they're taking away your awareness of it so you fight sideways instead of fighting the people above you

Golden age of gaming is now, though. We get so many bangers basically for free it's insane

get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part

Indie games are where it's at.
Big companies like Bethesda and EA are still run by fucking boomers and gen xers. The millennials and younger that work for them end up working on one game, and then they get fired after management fucks everything up.
- This is so true. Indie games are legitimately better these days. AAA titles can have a good game at their core, but it always feels like you're fighting with the game itself to enjoy it. From custom launchers and meaningless boring "side quests" and "achievements" to pad them out. Indie games are much better at cutting right to the point of what makes the experience rewarding.

More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue

I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
- You probably don't have shit ideas, you just need help making you ideas work. Even Tolkien had a group of people help I'm improve the Hobbit.
  
  One of the things I wanted to make, is a pixel style build a vehicle game, where you earn parts for vehicles that you build.
- If you still have a hint of that spark in you, download a game engine and give it a go. Make something short and quick just to learn. It's a fun hobby when you don't let it consume your life.
  Godot is a free and open source game engine, so lemmy would eat me alive if I didn't mention it, but any of them, including Unity, would work for this purpose.
  
  I simply don't have time or energy, because I'm fighting for survival in an extremely toxic work and home environment.
- Shit is subjective. As long as you love your own shit or the process of it, you are good.

the entire us went to shit, what's your point

Yeah, oh no a bunch of people got into an industry that they loved so much they got underpaid and lowered the value of their labour to be treated worse.
But then a bunch of them realized they could just use their passion to make something themself and get paid for it and now we are having a hard time justifying why the big industry's "shovels" are special.
It is a shame this happening to lots of industries right now for lots of other reasons too. With the big industry now trying to justify it as being cheaper to make because they automated all the people that make the product especially better.

Mostly or straight became indie devs or got they asses fired on AAA studios, let's be honest indie and double A studios are what still keep this hobbie alive today

Games are amazing right now, what is this talking about? EA/WB/Ubisoft dreck?

Excuse me, but a lot of passion han be found on the indie market.

The people who break there bakes making the games. Are the ones who enjoyed them as kids. It’s the executives and managers who run the decisions. Who have never played games before.

Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
- Boomers, unironically. Well then x too, but 45+ are the biggest share of gamers by far in the west.
  
  Boomers would be 60+ though. Anyone 45-59ish would be Gen X.

Ape Escape was such a good game. Shame that Sony has abandoned it

Marathon game

Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) ... made... any... game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh...
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like... I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough... I'm still pissed that EA killed Maxis... and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams... very often devolve into, or revolve around 'millenial speak' / 'millenial writing' ...
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio... yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that 'corporation bad, actually.'..
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that's made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit.... or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
Hell, even a seriously good mod by zoomers would count, I know I was modding many games before I even got out of highschool.
- The interesting answer by the way is that there is a glut of them as Roblox, is actually a game mostly about making other games.
  Its a more realized version of VR chat essentially for kids and alpha and Z is full of game devs who though are unfortunately in a single engine but with skill can actually transition to others and often do.
  Some real talent is being cultivated but they are mostly unseen by looking at the places they aren't.
  
  See, I am aware of the ... Im gonna call it 'Roblox Capture' phenomenon... and I am very, very concerned by this.
  As you say... there legitimately are tons of neat gamemodes being made up by Zoomer (and presumably also Gen Alpha) budding game devs...
  But as you say... its quite difficult to transition out of Roblox and learn all the other stuff you need to make your own game, especially if you are incentivized not to, by both the carrot of potential income, and the stick of everyone throwing a shit fit (cough, I mean uh, 'difficulty in overcoming the momentum of the network effect') if you try to move to your own platform.
  Roblox... has a very, very predatory digital and real world currency scheme.
  The Roblox owners are making way, way, waaaay more money off of their young gamemode devs than the tiny slice of the pie they actually get.
  And... its also basically a lottery, like being a youtuber or an OF model or whatever: 99.9% of people make basically no money, 0.1% make a decent or sizeable amount... and you only ever hear about, or from, the tiny minoirty of successful people.
  And thats to say nothing of how fucked up MTX and dark patterns are for the average user.
  Basically, Roblox achieved a huge scale, fully realized version of what many pay to play GMod Roleplay Servers do/did as well as Roleplay Servers for like GTAV and RDR2 and other games...
  You are right though that this is the interesting answer =D
- A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
  
  Hey there ya go!
  I didn't know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
  Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
  LC isn't exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
  Thank you for informing me =D
- But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that's made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit.... or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
  You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
  
  Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that ... I am trying to mean a game that... someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity, general cultural impact.
  Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release...
  But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team's ability to whip up something fairly basic... and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.
  Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.
  I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.
  I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: 'what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?'

Gen X is running those companies, they're the ones to blame for this shit.

I get the joke but I never understood the idea that gaming nowadays is “bad”. Just as there are many games that have shitty practices or are just bad, there are just as many that are good. Indie gaming is booming for a reason.
Sometimes I wonder that if the people that keep parroting this idea are just… Getting old? Getting fed up with gaming? Or maybe it’s just a nostalgia thing? All of these combined?
Anyway, Clair Obscure just came out and it’s a great JRPG, highly recommend it

'Easy' 'solution': Do game dev as a hobby, release as FOSS

I've been curious lately if the original Ape Escape is as good as I remember. I heard the sequels weren't as good, but I have fond memories of the first game on PS1.
- I prefer the sequels to AE1, with 3 being the best of the bunch (no pun intended).

Millennials killed gaming. And coffee. And avocado toast.

They played too many videogames instead of learning good skills. 😥