So far would you consider the 8th generation the worst gen of gaming?

It's more than that though it's not just one game it's a bunch of games compared to last gen and the gen before that developers took more risk and we got better games for it. This gen has great games but it's few and far between to what it use to be.

There have been plenty of great games that come out this generation, so far I'm happy with it.

@jec03: i see your point, but will counter with the fact that taking a risk does not in and of itself make a game good. In my experience, the first game to take a stab at something is rarely the best at doing it. The problem games of this generation fave is that they are mostly a product of itteration. The best games of today are a grab bag of concepts that would have been mind blowing a decade ago, and they are usually executed better. In my mind that makes them better gamea, even if not wholely original.

Probably but only because the console "generation" cycle is largely becoming redundant. There have been good games but I played them all on PC while my PS4's been gathering dust.

I would also add to this that while the AAA games might be a bit "safer" than some previous generations the indie market it bigger it has allowed games to be created, released and find a fan base that would never have seen the light of day in previous generations.

If you look outside that little box that is $60 console games, it's never been better

@jec03: Last gen developers and publishers were the most risk averse than they had ever been. While we may never go back to how it was in previous gens if AAA development continues to be so exorbitantly expensive, I feel like we're finally starting to recover from last gen and seeing more diversity on the market. At the very least we're seeing more avenues for smaller scale development and success. Riding everything on big budget AAA games is what got us here in the first place.

Go buy that collection of Atari 2600 games and let me know if you still think this is the worst generation ever

I played them when I was a kid I enjoyed them.

I been PC gaming for 12 years now and I have a PS4 I do enjoy Steam sales and all the awesome things you can do on PC. But to be honest when I got into PC gaming in 2005 there was one thing that was better that is missing from PC gaming today that is AAA PC exclusives and time exclusives. I miss the days when devs would push PC gaming companies like Valve, Monolith, Dice, Remedy, ID software ect. Now the only thing that is pushing PC hardware is VR which is good but I sure do miss the quality of AAA's we use to get .. Half Life 2, F.E.A.R,BF2,, Max Payne and Max Payne 2, Swat 4, Doom 3 Crysis ect..

True but I still wish they take some risks.

@jec03: Is all about perspective, based in you argument seems like you care more about visual fidelity than anything else. Personally speaking couldn't care less about fidelity .

I care more about gameplay, systems and mechanics. I don't think there is been a better time to play than today. So many interesting games with unusual concepts coming out each week.

I love great graphics and great gameplay but to say that all I care about is graphics is not true I go back to older games frequently because of there gameplay mechanics. Hell I been playing WWE raw vs smackdown 2006 on a PS2 emulator because I prefer the old gameplay compared to the new WWE 2k games.

I think this generation beats out the 7th simply because everything sort of works as intended this time around. The First Generation is likely the worst, because it was just simply the necessary ramp for the far better far more more versatile Second Generation of Odyssey 2 Atari 2600, Intellivision, Vectrex and Coleco.

It is hard not to see PS3's rough-start and being expensive, and XB360 just being BROKEN made it worst generation. I'm not even sure some of the good games make up for that, I think what people wanted to make in the Seventh only really turned out correctly in the Eighth.

Just a quick clarification:

1st generation: Pong, Fairchild, essentially pre-Atari stuff. Think 70s gaming.

2nd generation: Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and everything else leading up to the crash.

3rd generation: NES, Sega Masters System, Amiga.

4th generation: SNES, Genesis, Neo-Geo

5th Generation: Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn

6th Generation: PS2, XBOX, GameCube, Sega Dreamcast

7th Generation: Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U(?)

8th Generation: PS4, XBONE, Switch

I'm seeing a some people thinking Atari 2600 is first generation. It's not.

@jec03: You may have nostalgia for those PC games, I do as well, but PC gaming shortly after 2005 was a barren wasteland. It's a business, and an unsustainable. The only way a developer can release a video game on PC and make money these days is if they also release on console. There isn't a big enough market on PC alone to cover the increasing budgets of games.

This has a funny consequence, because there are far more big budget releases for PC now than I remember there being in the early 00s, even if they are ports of console games, and a lot of them are better on PC, particularly frame rate.

I'm not 100 percent sure on that though PC gaming is thriving more than ever and also you got kickstarter these days just look at Starship Citizen the insane amount of money that has been thrown at that game. If you think about it it's kinda of like the new Crysis of PC gaming I just hope it gets released lol. Also Valve could easily making Half life 3 a PC exclusive if they wanted to but yeah that will never happen. I think it's definitely possible with some publishers and devs but not all.

This might be presumptuous of me, but I truly do attribute people liking older generations better to nothing but nostalgia. Videogames are getting better by the year, across the board. My top 5 favorite games of all time is being dominated by games released this generation. Not because it's new, but because they are strictly better games than before that I cannot stop playing even if I wanted to.

I am conflicted. I have enjoyed this generation, and at least a few of the games (MGSV, Uncharted 4, Breath of the Wild) would end up on my personal top 10. At the same time, I haven’t felt like this generation has had much of an identity of its own.

Last generation spawned so many amazing new IPs (Mass Effect, Bioshock, Portal, Uncharted, Gears of War, Last of Us, etc etc). This generation seems like it has merely expanded on those new ideas without creating many of its own.

Part of this is probably my age. I was of an age when the last generation started that the industry seemed so full of wonder and potential. This generation started at an age for me where everything seems decidedly less intriguing. At this point, I feel like I’ve seen games turn and churn so much that nothing they do now can surprise me like I was in 2005.

For me, I guess it depends on what is used is used as a qualifier. I certainly don't think this generation is the worst per-se (they are all just products of their time), but I think I've found it the most disappointing in many ways. When I say that, I'm more talking more about the disappointing tech and it's associated visual priorities than anything, immediately followed by the worst industry bullshit we've seen yet.

In terms of horsepower and pure aesthetics, I've found this generation to be considerably lacking overall. Some outliers aside (hello Unchartered 4), graphically a great deal of games don't really look that much better than a good amount of the stuff we saw on PS3 and 360. When you compare the jumps made between PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 (using only Sony purely for the sake of brevity), the PS4, to me, comes off as really disappointing. The PS4 pro hardware makes significant steps there, but it will always be hamstrung by the fact that the base system exists. All games therefore have to be designed to meet the standards of the lowest common denominator and that's a great shame. Ultimately I think that the PS4 Pro and the One X are the systems that should've launched this generation in the first place.

On a similar point, I'm really disappointed that the current generation of consoles are chasing resolutions instead of frame rates. I will never understand why that sort of illusory 4K that we're now seeing has become more important than 60fps. One makes a game functionally more fluid and fun to play overall, the other does not.

Then we move onto the industry bullshit, and it's now at the most disgusting than it has ever been. Clearly cropped content to sell as DLC, other content withheld behind preorders, season passes, microtransactions, lootboxes, ridiculously lengthy installs that dump obscene amounts of data on relatively small hard drives, and bug ridden launches with enormous day 1 patches. I could go on but I think that's enough to make my point. I also think I may be morphing into Jim Sterling as I write this. I think a lot of this stuff has gotten completely out of hand, and I eagerly await a day where the industry a whole hits the reset button on this bullshit.

There have been some really great games released so far this generation, no doubt, but the above bullshit makes it so hard for me to truly enjoy a great deal of them. So many end up just feeling tainted to me, and it's a huge shame.

As a result, my consoles have essentially turned into dust collectors, and I just stick with my now mid-range PC.

That's a pretty shitty view to have of other people. It screams of indifference, refusing to acknowledge other points of views and tastes. Why should people even explain themselves if you're just gonna pull the nostalgia card? It is very presumptuous of you.

It's too early to say for sure, but it's on track to be my favourite generation.

It had a slow start, but that's almost always been the case with new generations. However 2015, 16, and now 17 have been three of the most astonishingly packed years for incredible games. After 2015 I was considering whether it was up there as one of the best years ever (probably not quite, but it'd make a top ten for sure), and then somehow 2016 was even better - and now 2017 is shaping up to top even that. If this gen carries on similarly it will absolutely be my favourite generation to date, as someone who started with the PS1/N64 and original Game Boy eras.

There's so much variety on offer, from the biggest-budget down to the tiniest indies. I'm obsessed with the gargantuan that is Destiny 2 right now, but I'm also deep in Pyre and just picked up Heat Signature. We've had one of the best-received Zelda games in forever, on a new Nintendo platform that the majority of people seem hugely in love with, Mario + Rabbids is a joyful delight that caught everyone off guard, and there's a gorgeous main-series Mario game to come. We've seen a return to form for the likes of Tekken, Sonic, and Resident Evil, a more general resurgence out of Japan with Yakuza, Persona 5, FFXV, Bloodborne, and NieR, and plenty of well-received major Western series including Horizon, Uncharted Lost Legacy, The Witcher 3, Rocket League, and much more. Plus the tons of aforementioned smaller titles.

I think the other part of it is that it's the best time to be playing games because time is linear (as far as we know, anyway).

In 1998, you could play Half-Life 1, Brood War, Ocarina of Time and Symphony of the Night.

In 2007, you could play Modern Warfare, Portal, Bioshock and Super Mario Galaxy ANDyou could still also play Half-Life 1, Brood War, Ocarina, and Symphony of the Night.

In 2017 you can play Breath of the Wild, Yakuza Zero, Half-Life 1, Doom (2016), Doom, Bioshock, Ocarina of Time, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Earthbound, Final Fantasy Tactics, and everything* else that has come out prior to this particular point in time and space.

*There are some exceptions, like The Matrix Online, but generally speaking...

Many of the top-grossing games right now are PC only: LoL, DOTA 2, PUBG, Dungeon Fighter Online, most MMOs, etc. Tencent is the biggest game publisher by revenue and they are almost exclusively focused on PC/mobile.

Also, using this classification the C64 would be a 3rd gen system, and the Amiga (assuming this means A500) belongs to 4th gen.

Not sure where you got that idea from. The 1990's and 2000's were when developers like Valve and Blizzard made most of their early growth, and it was exclusively thanks to PC gaming.

Hell, they're still 2 of the biggest companies today. Not just in PC gaming, but bigger than most consoles developers and publishers.

Last gen felt a bit more lacking than this gen to me so far. So I do not think it's the worst.

Last gen was my least favorite from around 2010ish to 13 specifically. I had a 360 and downloadable games were cool but I don't like multiplayer games which was one of the defining characteristics of that generation, and I really loved PS1 and PS2 franchises that either didn't come out or kind of lost their way (mostly japanese devs that were really struggling), or new franchises just didn't grab me like they used to except for maybe Batman.

However this gen, PS4 specifically has had some amazing single player games, (Witcher3 Bloodbourne, Infamous SS) return of some of my favorite franchises (Ratchet and Clank MGS5, Crash Bandicoot) with games I'm really looking forward to (Spiderman, GOW, Red Dead 2). Also the PS4's "vibe" has reminded me of the PS2 ever since it launched which was not the case with PS3.

I think there are a lot of bad trends going on in modern gaming and there have certainly been a few disappointing titles released this generation but I've also been having a blast with all of the great games from this year. I think I might have agreed with two or three years ago about this generation but there has been such an embarrassment of riches in recent times that I couldn't possibly complain. Being a fan of Japanese games has been especially great with major titles coming out, like Persona 5 and Nier, and a general increase in smaller Japanese titles getting localized, like all of the Falcom games being released this year or the visual novel boom we're experiencing right now.

I'd have to agree with Vinny, there has never been a better time to be playing video games.

This is a transitional generation for sure. Big budget games are forgoing single player experiences more and more for microtransaction laden online experiences. That's fine and dandy. I won't be playing those. Meanwhile, smaller studios are cranking out higher and higher quality stuff. I've only played two 2017 games: Alwa's Awakening and NieR: Automata, and they're both phenomenal. Last generation, stagnating hardware resulted in stagnating game formulas. I think it's good that things are changing. Even if I don't like a lot of the changes.

@condroid: @tuxedocruise: Yes, but I didn't talk about the 90s or even early 2000s. All Valve games except DOTA have had console releases to supplement income, and they haven't made a lot of games since Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2.

Blizzard didn't make any games between WOW and Starcraft 2, which granted was a big PC exclusive and sold well, but not really close to what Blizzard was accustomed to.

As for LOL, PUGB, Dungeon Fighter Online, we were discussing big budget (or AAA if you will) PC only games, and I'm not sure they qualify. They make a lot of money, but I doubt they incentivize EA, Ubisoft or others to make big PC games. There are some, including strategy games like Total War and Civilization, but these are few and far between, unlike back in the early 2000s.

I agree on the C64. I played it extensively growing up, before getting a NES and I guess I misplaced it. The Amiga 500 was released in 1987 and discontinued in 1991. I think putting it in 3rd generation is fair, but Amiga as a whole can be said to straddle both 3rd and 4th generations.

2005 is still considered the 2000's. But if you want to be pedantic about it, I will also include 2005 and beyond for Valve and Blizzard.

Valve made enough money from PC sales of their IPs to remain profitable and successful. So much so, that the console versions of their games came out much later than their PC originals, and Valve didn't even port them. It was Electronic Arts that did the console ports, and the console versions didn't sell nearly as well as the PC versions. So saying that Valve needed console sales of their games to keep from bankruptcy is straight up false.

How does Blizzard not being accustomed to a genre of video games tie in with how successful they were in PC gaming? Some EverQuest developers left SOE to create WoW, so it wasn't completely new territory for them.

There are some, including strategy games like Total War and Civilization, but these are few and far between, unlike back in the early 2000s.

Again, not sure where you're getting this idea from. The Total War series has maintained a 2-3 year release cycle since its first game:

Shogun: Total War (2000)

Medieval: Total War (2002)

Rome: Total War (2004)

Medieval II: Total War (2006)

Empire: Total War (2009)

Napoleon: Total War (2010)

Total War: Shogun 2 (2011)

Total War: Rome II (2013)

Total War: Attila (2015)

Total War: Warhammer (2016)

Total War: Warhammer II (2017)

In fact, judging from the past 3 years, the Total War games are releasing faster than they have been since the early 2000s, with just 1 year between each game.

Even looking at the Civilization series, the number of released games has maintained, and sometimes even surpassed, the frequency of the series in the early 2000s.

I didn't say there were developers and publishers that were not successful after 2005, I said there were fewer marquee games released. Yes, Valve made more money on the PC releases, but it didn't stop them from dipping their toes in the console market, and I did not even come close to claiming that Valve would've gone bankrupt without the console releases.

There are still big budget PC releases. The Total War and Civilization series are good examples. However, there are fewer big budget PC releases today, when compared to the early 2000s.

I own about every one of these games, so I don't need a reminder of their frequency. I'm saying I know there are PC games with a lot of money thrown at them, that are successful. I'm also saying that big budget games developed exclusively for PC are fewer and far between.

Because sometimes they admit in their own explanation it is because of nostalgia? Unless you are suggesting it is extremely rare that older pieces of entertainment are chosen as the best by a person for nostalgia reasons, I don't really see why you're getting so upset. You say 'the nostalgia card' as if it is something that should immediately be dismissed, while plenty of people have no problems admitting it is the case for them.

The only presumption I made that can be refuted is that I implied it is rare it isn't the case. But we have enough opinions going around that we can at least say it is fairly often. Given the statistics we have on media like this, I don't think my presumption is that far fetched. Or do you think someone who plays Half-Life today will like it as much as you did when you were younger and that game has just come out? I don't feel like I have to explain much further that nostalgia plays a role in this.

Yeah, they reign the writing in more and, as a result, the characters have a chance to develop instead of just becoming meme parrots. As a result, they make the more absurd moments work. On par with Walking Dead, for sure.

Sometimes they say that. I don't say it's nostalgia. Plenty of people don't say that. I have no problem admitting a game I once liked isn't good. Your statement was too general.

You may have nostalgia for those PC games, I do as well, but PC gaming shortly after 2005 was a barren wasteland. It's a business, and an unsustainable. The only way a developer can release a video game on PC and make money these days is if they also release on console. There isn't a big enough market on PC alone to cover the increasing budgets of games.

I am going off your original theory that a video game developer needed to make a console port in order to make money. If a company releases PC only games and doesn't make any profits as you mentioned, what do you think eventually happens?

You mentioned the only way a developer could make money these days is if they also released console ports, but now you're saying that developers would be fine without console releases?

Valve choosing to have console ports of their games wasn't a choice between, "Either we port these games to consoles, or we'll lose our business."

It was Valve saying, "Do we want to make some more money by having console ports, on top of the millions upon millions of dollars we've made from PC already?"

If you've changed your mind, then say you did. Or choose one train of thought and stick with it.

Of course StarCraft 1 sold more copies than StarCraft 2, SC1 launched 12 years before SC2 did. This is like saying the PS4 isn't doing so hot because the PS2 has outsold it from launch to 2017.

Given that the original StarCraft had a 12 year head start on sales against StarCraft: Wings of Liberty, the best comparison would be to look at their sales period respective to one another. It's the only way to do an apples-to-apples comparison.

The original StarCraft sold around 1.5 million copies within its first year of release (secondary source). While StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty sold nearly 4.5 million copies within its first 5 months of release.

So I'm not sure where you were going with that?

Even if we compared the 19 years of StarCraft 1 sales to the 7 years of StarCraft 2 sales, SC2 sold much more than just half of SC1 sales:

StarCraft (including all expansions): 9,500,000

StarCraft II (including all expansions): 8,600,000

Source

Modern PC gaming is doing better than it has been since the early 2000s, 2005, or whatever previous years you want to cite.

Games today are fantastic! I think the last time I enjoyed games this much was back in the SNES era. Personally I dont care much about if a game is "AAA" or not, but I guess if that matters a great deal to you then I could see this generation being a bit stale so far.

Not the worst, but a very slooooow burn. And most of the good games don't really do anything new. We've reached such a refined and almost perfected state for the different genres at this point. All the 3rd person AAA games play and look great. All the first person AAA games are good. It's been figured out, and studios are basically churning out fantastic games that aren't any different from each other. Like blockbuster movies, they have become vehicles with which to deliver bland story and spectacle, not gameplay.

VR is all that truly excites me at this point. Next to nothing new has happened in games during this gen aside from VR.

All that aside, I think the coming two years of console games will be fricken amazing. 2017 has easily been the most packed year of 8th gen, so it might continue.

HA! No.

I remember Gen 2. That was wave after wave of awful.

2017 alone is already competing for one of the best years in gaming.

If you're into boring AAA shooters and open world action games, yeah, it's getting pretty stale. I tried playing through Horizon: Zero Dawn, and while I can tell it's a solid game that's likely very good if you are into it, I just couldn't muster myself to finish it.

However, getting into weird niche games, indie games and all the crazy stuff Nintendo is putting out has made me get way into games in a way I haven't been in about 10 years or so. I already have a backlog of amazing games to play through on Switch (I am trying to get like 4 different games done before Super Mario Odyssey comes out). Everything I'm playing right now is so different and so fresh. The variety is amazing.

Here's what I'm currently working through:

• a 2D Golf RPG
• a turn-based tactical strategy game with Mario and Rabbids (yes, that still seems batshit insane to think about) that is likely to end up in my top 3, if not top 5 for the year
• a Metroid-y mining/exploration game with RPG-style leveling
• a multiplayer third person shooter in which no mode actively rewards killing other players, but instead encourages teamwork to achieve objectives (which is why I love it so much). My favourite weapon in the game is literally a bucket.
• a new Sonic the Hedgehog game that's not only not terrible, but actually amazingly good
• a Zelda game so good, that not only have I played most of it twice (on Wii U then on Switch), but I have still managed to lose whole evenings to exploring and looking for shrines. And I still haven't actually beat Ganon yet.
• a New Game Plus run of a Persona game (can never go wrong there)

And that's just what I'm playing on Switch and PS4. Next week I'll be getting Axiom Verge on Switch too. I also want to get the new Divinity game on PC. And Cuphead.

And then a new Mario game comes out in a few weeks.

It's been a good year.

Compared to last gen its a bit disappointing but I think overall its better than the PS2/GC/Xbox gen and possibly better than the 32/64 gen. I don't think you can just say "I'm talking about AAA only" because until last gen that really wasn't much of a factor.

I cant go back to Atari era games and have a hell of a time with 8 bit too. So i'd say its better than those as well.

I think it'd sit somewhere pretty close to the middle of the pack for me.

And plenty do. Nevertheless, you have fair criticism of what I said, so I will elaborate a bit. I think it isn't just an opinion that games are getting better, not just graphically, but mechanically and conceptually as well. That's not to say all games now are better than all games of the past, nor that any game from the past can't be better than most games today; but as a general statement I do think it is a fair one to make.

It is possible that someone just likes older games better and their top list consists mostly out of them, but in a broader scale I think it would be odd if few games on a top list are newer games, because they are better looking, playing and designed games more often than not. But it does seem to be the case that the top 5 and top 10 picks of a person who has been playing games for a long time are old classics.

It is presumptuous of me to assume that is because of nostalgia, but it's not entirely prejudice or inaccurate. Nostalgia also has a negative connotation in this discussion I feel like, which I don't necessarily agree with. For instance, I will tell you that Mass Effect is my favorite gaming trilogy of all time. That includes 1. And that is because of nostalgia, because it actually runs awful, plays awful and doesn't look great. Nostalgia is a true strength here, not a weakness.

The video game crash was a primarily American phenomenom, in both Europe and Japan the industry was booming, and Spain saw the rise of its "Golden Age of software" in 1983. A large percentage of the populations across the UK, Scandinavia and West Germany got home computers, and there was a huge indie scene built upon the availability of BASIC programming guides and magazines printing programming code and lessons.

I'd guess we're more likely to experience a global crash now than we were in '83.

I'd still not quite say we're at the worst point in gaming we've ever been at, but, yeah, I'm not too optimistic about the current state of games either.

@fisk0: Ohhh okay, I did not know that, I thought it was a global thing from what I read, so good history lesson/correction.

I do stand by though, even one country more or less having a crash, as still worse than what's going on now.

If anything the problem we have now is people spend too much money on games, microtransactions wouldn't be around if they weren't profitable to be there.
Not to forgive the developers/publishers who put them in and exploit people with the use of them, but the fact is people are spending money on them.

@chaser324: generation numbering is pretty meaningless.