Good games are still being made

New games suck nowadays. They are the same thing over and over again, they release half done but with double the amount of DLCs, they are filled with loot boxes and bore you with their crappy story. You have probably seen such comments here and there on the internet. They are not wrong and I am tired of seeing the same problems too, but I still have to admit that overall this hobby is steadily getting better.

My suspicion is that most of these comments come from people who play on just one console or play only "AAA" games, for some reason. While I owned a console or two, I am predominantly a computer player and honestly, playing on computer has never been better.

1. There is a huge amount of games coming out every year. On top of that a large portion of old games is still available for purchase (and even more by other means).
2. To play the latest and most demanding games you still need to drop a lot of cash in hardware but you can also get something very cheap and play the old games. Running old games can be finicky sometimes but it is doable and when your old console stops working you can still play your games on an emulator. The games themselves are pretty cheap too when you wait for a sale on a digital copy.
3. The quality is overall higher. Yes, there is still shovelware, but it is easier to make games now and make them look good. It is also easier to make a good game because we have plenty of historical examples. In the early days of gaming, most games were crap, but that was due to inexperience and hardware limitations of the time. Only later on we started to get games here and there that stood the test of time and are just as fun to play today as they were back then. These games are more common now. It is also easier to spot bad games before buying them thanks to user reviews and gameplay videos.
4. It is true that some publishers are dry on innovation other than disguising gambling mechanics as fun, but the rest of the market is still trying new things. Occasionally I find a new game that does something I haven’t seen before in such form. If you look at my lists of interesting games you will find that a good number of them are fairly recent releases.

You just can’t tell me there is nothing good to play anymore. As a little experiment, I quickly went through all the games released this year on GOG and just based on first impressions I found 19 games, out of roughly 150, that looked good enough for me to buy them (which is a step above "looks fun, I’ll try it", I was being picky). Unfortunately, I still have so many games left to play that I don’t buy just good games anymore, only those that do something new (or are part of a series I really like).
So, if you are looking for good games to play but can’t seem to find any, I recommend to get a device with a very large library (you know, like a computer, playing on that is only as hard as you make it for yourself) and give a chance to highly rated games from developers you never heard of.