boy was that a mistake. If there's a hobby you like, ,its always best to keep it niche, lest the mainstream completely ruins it and the hobby's communities as well
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I bet a lot of gamers can relate to this around 2008. People were talking up Shadow of the Colossus and Mass Effect because they proved that games could be art. But what ended up happening is the industry promoted a bunch of shysters and pretentious amateurs in a cargo cult race towards legitimacy, like Anita and the clowns who work for Kotaku.
The problem is larger than games, though. Nerdy franchises across all mediums became stupider and more political as they tried to be more thoughtful. Some point out the desire for sophistication itself is often the problem, but although I agree, the root cause runs much deeper than that. We are facing a whole generation of middle and upper class millennials, now firmly in the workforce, who have been conditioned by the elites to blindly accept the totemic credentials of our culture such as "expert" pronouncements and New York Times headlines and whose minds have been utterly polluted by the K-12 system that raised them in place of their parents.
For me, it was 2000-2 when Xbox and console gamers in general were starting to have an influence on PC games and developers. It was slow at first because PC gamers were very resistant and knew we had a good thing, but bit by bit the creep was evident. PC gamers were accustomed to full blown expansions that were competitive products, in most cases, and we saw the garbage console gamers were tolerating, especially shit pushed by Microsoft, and most of us pushed back when we could.
WoW changed things by drawing many console gamers to PC, and the lines between the two audiences started to blur. By 2006, we had the "horse armor" BS that, while mocked and rejected, was still a sign of what was to come.
In another timeline Halo never switched to being an Xbox exclusive and games of the 2020s didn't become worse than games from the 2000s.