I’ve seen a lot of videos on YouTube lately on dealing with video game burnout, but that’s not my problem. I have a hard time finding any modern games that I want to play. I still want to play. I just think most modern games suck. It’s not a problem with the enthusiasm, it’s a problem with the modern product.

So let’s talk about it.

I’ll be clear, I am not burned out on games in the way that a lot of content creators seem to think. I love games. I love playing games. I’ve been doing it as long as video games have existed. I played some of the first Pong games out there. I was in some of the very first arcades. It’s not that I don’t want to play video games, it’s that I have a really hard time finding anything that I think is worth playing.

I think it’s funny how many content creators on YouTube think that the games aren’t the problem, it’s the people. No, it’s the games. The games just suck. It’s not me at all.

Granted, I have a very particular taste in video games. Mostly, I want to play shooters with RPG elements or RPGs with shooter elements. I only want to play solo. I do not and will not play with other people online. I’ve been at this far too long to know better than that. I spent many years in the MMO marketplace, learning that the vast majority of people online are trolls and assholes. I want nothing to do with that. I only play solo.

Try to find a good solo-only shooter game these days and you’ve got very few options. I want a really good story and that’s where most of these games fall down. Why? Because everyone is just looking for graphics and I couldn’t care less. Honestly, I don’t. Maybe that’s from the time that I grew up, but watching bad-quality video is normal for me. I grew up in the time of bad VHS and over-the-air TV with static. I don’t care if it’s running in 8k at 60fps. Hell, I have a hard time telling the difference between 1080p and 4k. I’m not looking for hyper-realistic graphics. I just want to have fun.

People seem to have lost the concept of fun for the sake of fun anymore. They’re playing games for bragging rights or to show off and I think that’s positively childish. I want to be entertained and games these days rarely entertain me.

There was a time that I actually looked forward to sitting down to play. I’d wait all day through work, just so I could sit down and turn the game on. That doesn’t happen anymore. Now, my game-play is all based on boredom. I’ve got nothing else to do so I might as well play something.

People will say “you’ve just got nostalgia!” Nope, that’s not it. I can still go and play the old games and get the same feelings today that I did when they were new. At the moment, I’m playing through Skyrim, just because my wife wanted to play so we bought it for a modern console and it’s fun! Is it perfect? No. Do I care about the graphics? Not remotely. The gameplay is fun, even with all of Bethesda’s never-fixed bugs and the story is entertaining. I engage with the game in a way that I haven’t with any modern games in a very long time.

Compare that to a modern game like Starfield and there’s no comparison. Starfield sucks. It’s empty, lifeless, boring, all the characters are obnoxious, the story is horrible and I have no interest in ever starting it up again. Maybe I will some day, now that they have mods for it, just to see if I can make it fun. I shouldn’t have to make a game fun. It should be fun on its own.

Unfortunately, game franchises have gotten less fun as time has gone on. Halo used to be great. Now it’s crap. I know why,  because they changed studios, but everything in a modern Halo game, I want nothing to do with it. It’s all geared toward multi-player combat and I don’t want to play that. I used to love Far Cry. Now… it’s just not there anymore. A lot of people think it peaked with 3, I’ll say that I really enjoyed 5, other than the ending, but I think 6 was crap. In fact, most things Ubisoft puts out these days is crap.

Every now and then there’s a game that I can enjoy in the moment, but that moment passes far too quickly. Unlike a lot of the classic games that I love and can replay over and over again, there is no replayability for modern games. They’re shallow, mindless grind-fests, filled with microtransactions that I will never, ever pay, and far too much of “the message” that I will never, ever consume. Come back when you’ve figured out what your target audience wants. It’s why the entire industry is dying. They’ve lost sight of what matters: the fun.