You are not alone in your lack of interest in all the new games, as the WOWmaster himself observes:
60% of gameplay time was spend on games 6 years or older in 2023. Older TV shows dominate streaming networks as well.
This is not a coincidence, as streaming has prioritized wokeness over quality, and AAA have also prioritized profit and the narrative over fun.
This is why we fight.
Nobody wants to play the new stuff if it means being preached at and scolded while they destroy our most memorable IPs and characters.
There has always been a problem with the suits devoting all the resources to graphics while the designers fight, mostly in vain, to place the emphasis on gameplay. One need only compare the difference between the original Fantasy General, which I stil play from time to time, and its 3D successor, to understand why most of the time and money that went into “improving” the original game was not only wasted, but dowright detrimental.
Most, if not all, of the games that feature a substantive focus on gameplay are now in the independent space.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the way in which convergence not only distracts from character, plot, and story, but downright destroys them, as the Dark Herald has chronicled repeatedly, and in great detail, on the Arkhaven blog. Mary Sue cannot be permitted to be less than strong, independent, and perfect in every way. The Magic Negro cannot be permitted to be less than saintly and beneficient. Saint Gay can never be less than charming, tolerant, and perfectly committed to the love of his gay life, whom he met approximately 5 seconds after coming out.
Convergence requires ideal caricatures, not strong characters. And the plot is always predictable, even more predictable than the pre-social justice Hellmouth plots were, because every episode has a moral that is more explicitly obvious than He-Man lecturing the kids at the end.
And so, we build our own entertainment, one meme, one short story, one RPG module, and one comics episode, at a time.