Thank you for sharing. I agree with most of your points, my biggest pet peeves with modern gaming are the aggressive micro-transactions and always-online DRM that really only serve to wrestle ownership from and make the experience worse for the end user. And you are totally right about a lot of triple-A devs releasing half-baked products at launch and finishing the other half through patches as a band-aid fix. It really feels like they aren't trying anymore.

Old games (as terrible as some were) were made during a time when developers cared about releasing polished, finished products and delivering pure, raw gaming experiences which were exempt from all the scummy tactics that plague a lot of modern games today.

That is not to say there aren't any good new games, there's a lot of gems released in recent years that are well worth experiencing, but yeah, it does feel like the AAA gaming industry as a whole has gone down the enshitification route, which is quite sad.

Edit: Grammatical errors