The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics..
I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)
The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics.. I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)