I have a different reason for being stressed about the state of gaming today: its complete takeover by aggressive, totalitarian left wing political activists. It started with gaming journalism and communities in 2014, and quickly spread to the games themselves. So I stopped buying Western games entirely and focused only on Japanese ones. But then I had to stop buying from Steam because they, too, jumped on board the leftist bandwagon. So I limited myself to GOG. But then I had to stop buying from GOG because they, too, jumped on board the leftist bandwagon. Well at least I still had my PS4 and Vita... oh wait, no, Sony are now leftists too, and even more extreme than anyone else. No more Sony games, then. And Nintendo? The third party publishers seem to be converging towards leftism as well, whether out of fear or out of conviction, and I can only assume Nintendo themselves will sooner or later follow suit, so no reason to bother with them. What remains after all this? Some independent Japanese games published through niche channels (for now), and freeware games.
I can tolerate the conventional problems of the industry, as they are at least very obvious, happen on a game-by-game basis, and are motivated by mere greed, but the politics are a miasma hanging over everything. Even if the game itself doesn't seem to have any politics, you can still count on the developers mouthing off on twitter. If all else fails, the stores themselves are still compromised, so in the end it doesn't matter what the game is like. I don't even pay attention to new releases anymore, because there's no point. Of course there are thousands of older games for many different platforms, and I still have a lot of games backlogged, so it's not like I don't have anything to play. But as far as I'm concerned the worldwide game industry is dead.
