I know it's a thing generally these days because of how shit multiplayer especially has gotten but if I see something that's 'online' now I don't want anything to do with it. Every new release it's the same story, they can barely be called games anymore they're more like a live service with some minor gameplay elements tacked on in the most half-arsed way imaginable. That goes for a lot of supposedly singleplayer releases as well depending on the company.
I think I'd much rather pour my free hours into something like Microsoft Flight Simulator because then I'd at least gain a valuable skill from it and I've also found myself delving back into the good stuff that was the early 2000's releases. Even if you see something that looks vaguely promising it inevitably gets annihilated by the DEI contractors that plague this industry now.
It's extremely ironic that the games industry is trying to cater to anybody who isn't a gamer and they seem to be all mentally ill weirdos to one degree or another who have an addiction problem and fleece them for all their money before moving onto the next cringey fad. I'm sorry for coming across too black pilled, but if a game does well it seems like that developers will go out of their way to ruin it because yet again, they've shown that gamers do not matter and we're nothing more than a vehicle for hype to get their product into the normie sphere who just want to college digital items all day instead of play the fucking game.
There's no camaraderie in multiplayer games anymore. Third-party servers and server browsers are dead. There is only matchmaking controlled by algorithms made by developers who don't play their own games. All you get are retards that you'll never see again. Once the skill-based matchmaking algorithm decides you're winning too much with your current team, it'll decide to shuffle everyone around. When you solo queue, you're effectively a glorified bot for someone else to have fun in the game. The anticheat becomes more invasive, yet the cheaters remain. Reporting does nothing. Ban waves come in months later, when the game is near-dead and the publisher needs to pump up the player count for the next quarterly investor meeting. The cheaters come back after the next Steam sale.
I'm not doing it anymore.
Sums up the whole situation with multiplayer perfectly, multiplayer games were always pretty faddy lets be real, but now it seems that the developers deliberately make it all that way so they can milk the whales in waves, everything revolves around the whales and not making a game with gameplay.
Yup, I've put less than 100 hours of csgo/cs2 in the past 5 years because devs forget adults who don't watch e-sports or buy skins exist. Because of the type of person that buys cheats, a competitive shooter is in a catch-22. Go niche and reduce revenue to attract a self-selecting audience, or go big and get all the human NPCs (who Eternal September organic indie successes) and tech-illiterates that can't bother to install hacks in a VM or seperate machine.