A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you're telling me that was only one year? There's no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.

Also, and I'm just throwing this out there, maybe the circlejerk of nostalgia bait for Gen X/Millennials means fuck-all to younger people in general because it's the nostalgia of their parents, not their own thing?

Like, aren't we seeing this in so many different properties? As time marches on, interest wanes? Nobody cares about Marvel movies anymore. Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore. The most hardcore fanatics tend to be older and had the originals, which were literally original content, as things they grew up with. Part of the mystery and excitement of them was how much was left unexplained. Seriously, the Clone Wars was this mysterious fucking thing when it was just an offhand comment by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. Now we have entire TV series dedicated to the background of the Clone Wars. Mystery gone. The first season of The Mandalorian brought back a sense of mystery to the series and then promptly dropped it to mix it in with every other piece of Star Wars memorabilia.

Young people want their own stuff that they're growing up with, they don't want rehashes of the shit their parents obsessed over.

Look at the continued interest in Adventure Time spinoffs, for example. Adventure Time first came out when I was just shy of 29. It would be fodder for the children of people just slightly older than me. It was also enjoyable for older folks who enjoyed silly fantasy, which gave it wider appeal. It persists more because it was an actual original thing that some people grew up with.

We live in an era where copyright that lasts 100 years after authorial death has broken corporations brains and they are scared to death of anything original in case it might not be a clear moneymaker. Letting interest in a new property grow over time is almost unheard of in the Netflix era of two seasons and then fuck you, it's over. So even when new properties are explored, most aren't given enough time to mature into something that becomes truly nostagliac for a younger generation.

If corporations want people to be as invested in long-lived series, they have to allow the option for new, interesting series to take the stage. Is it really a shocker that people are over games that started in the NES era? That young people want stories and ideas that reflect the world they live in, not the one their parents grew up in? Young people absolutely lose their shit over Undertale and Deltarune, both games made by a single auteur developer. Pokemon, referenced in the article, were sleeper hits that took time before they became an absolute craze.

I'm in my forties, and I constantly talk about how the world our parents brought us up to live in was dead before we were born. It's the same but at an accelerated pace for kids these days. The world we know and are trying to prepare them for no longer exists. Our stories and nostalgia become meaningless for our kids because it doesn't speak to their experiences.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Ill preface by saying I didnt read the article. But I also think that the state of gaming today is much worse than it was in the early 2000s for millennials.

When I was growing up, games had to come out complete so they were generally much more polished. However, when the Xbox360 came out, console makers gave the ability to devs to release patched versions via updates. Initially it was a great idea - devs could fix bugs they might have missed while testing. But then this quickly spiralled into studios forcing devs to release 1/2 baked games in a horribly broken state.

I also think how much you generally have to pay for games has gone way up with respect to the cost of living. Video gaming is much more of a luxury now, than a simple past time. Plus there are so many F2P mobile games out there, that there is even less of an incentive to get into a console / PC gaming.

• Diablo Immortal? F2P (i know theres probably micro transactions and bullshit)
• Diablo 4? PS5 ($500 - assuming you dont have the console already) + Diablo 4 ($67) + PS Plus ($14/month) = $581 + tax