a lot of these games got far outclasses by their 7th gen counterparts which still hold up today. 6th gen was a great time for the start of new franchises and the golden age of the Tony Hawk games but aside from that, I wouldn’t wanna go back many of the 6th gen rockstar games and capcom stuff.
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I agree you wouldn’t go back to it really but if you were in the time, I think the time taken for games to make and release is far better than waiting 4/5//6 years for a game like we have to do these days.
Ps2 XB gamecube era.
Forget the shitty low budget movie licensed games but the high quality ones still hold up today. Look at games like Ninja Gaiden metroid prime god of war 1 and 2 and a ton of other high quality games. Still hold up fairly well today.
Oh and TC…good luck avoiding relegation tomorrow…
Cheers, I’ve pretty much accepted our fate. So I’m at ease with it.
Expect the worst hope for the best
For the industry itself, hard to argue Gen 3 and 4 weren’t a boom period.
Games were being made by a handful of people or less and in a fraction of the time that they were in later generations and yet still being sold for $60-$80USD
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Difference is you could get them cheaper through many second hand outlets. Nowadays theyre much harder to get access to
I’m not sure how that relates to the OP though?
Games cost fuck all to make back then
Games took way less time to make back then
Yet they were still being sold for what games are being sold for today (and in many cases more)
Not sure how Gen 3/4 don’t win
360/PS3/Wii.
We got entire trilogies of games in 6 years. Mass Effect, Uncharted, Gears etc. These days it’s 6 years to make just one installment
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Not enough to make up for the difference, but cartridge accounted for a good amount of the cost of those games.
The era with home computers in the 80s. Everybody could develop, no stupid expensive entry fee for a dev kit. It resulted in the most diverse software lineup, wild experiments and all that from some garage dev teams. Indie games today are just trying to recreate this setting.
During the 16 bit era games were expensive AF…even the second hand copies. I bought Mortal Kombat 2 (after MK3 was out) for the equivalent of 40 euros back then and me and my friends thought it was the fuckin’ deal of the century. To give another example I bought Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (which was such a bad port) for 100 euros brand new on release date. Due to the crazy prices the main way to play more games than maybe two or three a year (that we could afford to buy) was to trade with friends (we had a whole trading SNES games “scene” here in my area back then).
And people now are complaining about full price games like Nintendo’s 1st party (which I can almost always find for 50-55e brand new at release) and “having nothing to play” while we have access to so many games via so many different ways nowadays. Kids these days. 
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I mean we live in a digital age so its different.
I still rarely buy full priced Digital games. I’m not at the stage where I’m gonna drop 60 bucks on a digital game unless its an Elden Ring…which is the only full priced digital game I’ve paid for for years.
And people don’t complain about Nintendo games being expensive…they complain about them overpricing their ports.
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I think you’re right about that and the root cause of that is changed expectations from gamers.
A fighting game couldn’t release with a basic single player progression and versus modes, akin to what you find in the arcades. And if it did it certainly couldn’t release for $60 to $70. Though 30 years ago it was perfectly fine for Mortal Kombat.
The push for 50+ hour games is essentially rooted in offering more value to the player, but it’s created new expectations. So we can’t fault players, exclusively, for this. There’s always a new game that tries something new to get our attention over the competition’s products and they reset expectations. Games trying to outdo their previous iterations also raise expectations to new heights.
It’s a natural evolution of the industry as products mature.
This is why I agree with the sentiment of the DC/PS2/GC/XBox gen having the right balance of gameplay offered, expectations, output, and quality. You could argue that products were generally a little too basic in the generations prior, and far too complex in the following generations. Again, generally speaking.
While I think today is the best time to be a gamer because indie games fill in the gaps that major publishers leave behind: indie games are from generally inexperienced teams and take a bit longer to make at a high level of quality than what we saw back then where you had highly experienced teams that got to grips with 3d game dev in the generation prior and hit the ground running. So they were able to pump out high quality games quick.
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