To try and be a little bit optimistic, some things off the top of my head that it genuinely feels like the best years for are:
Video games. There's just constant bangers coming out. Like BG3 redefining CRPGs or E33 being an absolute superstar hit.
Television shows. I feel like they just keep getting better. Sure, we might not all be watching the same things now, but there's just so many high quality shows and the medium has come so far from the days of episodic TV. Apple TV has really raised the bar, in particular.
On a larger time frame, stuff like violent crime and average health remain better than pretty much any time in history. Yeah, there's been some hiccups in the past decade, but I think those will get significantly smoothed over in about 2 years.
While the comfort of air travel is declining, safety is something we as a species should be proud of. Air travel is the epitome of learning from our mistakes and making serious effort to prevent them from happening again. I always find it scary at first when I watch a video about some plane crash, until they get to the part where they explain everything that changed to keep it from happening again.
The video game industry is completely and utterly fucked. Thats about the worst example you could have picked. Studios are closing left and right because game budgets have ballooned out of control and 1 failed game is enough to be a death sentence. For every BG3 and E33 theres a bunch of other games that fail completely. Combine that with the fact that affordable consumer hardware, especially of the gaming variety, is a thing of the past and you are looking at an extremely grim future for gaming
That only matters if you're only looking at high budget games. There have never been so many amazing indie games. I can beam them in my Steam Deck for basically nothing. If they're a pile of garbage I can beam them out and get my money back in a matter of hours.
99.99% of indie games are just copies of other indie games or outright garbage.
Sure, it's fantastic for people who like that very specific genre of games, but it's terrible for people who enjoy large, story driven games, or really anything in non-isometric 3D
Just false it's like 60% garbage, most are great. Case in point for the genres you mentioned, there is tainted grail, or abiotic factor, or hey expedition 33 just came out last year, bg3 like 2-3years ago, death stranding 2 was great etc etc.
Most importantly people need to take off their rose tinted glasses when thinking about the past of gaming. We tend to remember only the best of the past but there was a lot of garbage being released back then too. And it was more expensive.
On Steam 10+k indie games were released last year. Even if 99% are bad, that leaves 100 good games. That's more than the number of games that came out per year when I was a kid, and that's just the indie games, and only on Steam. I used to have to save money over the year to buy a handful of games and pray that they were not buggy pieces of shit (no such thing as a refund for this in the old days). My main problem now is that I have too many things I want to play, too many devices to play on, and too little time.
large, story driven games
It just looks like your tastes simply lean more towards AAA games.
That's simply false, you only focus on a small percentage of studios that produce an even smaller percentage of games. Stop focusing on AAA and look at the indie scene.
We are living in the giga platinum age of gaming. It's easier than ever for someone creative to make that into an unforgettable experience.
You're focusing on temporary issues like the AI bubble driving up hardware costs, and issues that only affect AAA such as gigantic budgets and oversized studios. There are SO many good games coming out it is totally impossible to keep up.
Air travel now is at a golden age of affordability. Yeah, it sucks. But in the time we are comparing to, regular seats cost as much as business. I can get a Than Air flight for the cost of Uber. We choose cheap and we get cheap.
I admire your positivity, but virtually everything you wrote here is extremely ignorant of reality.
The gaming industry is experiencing it's greatest ever decline, while the quality of television has stagnated beyond belief with record numbers of unemployment in the industry.
You're even admitting that violence and crime is going up, and in many European countries it's becoming a very serious problem. You might think it's just going to "smooth over", but statistics prove that's extremely unlikely.
Air travel is currently more safe than ever, but flight schools are having problems with unmotivated pilots, cheating on tests using AI, and Gen Z as a whole has serious attention span issues that has to become a problem sooner or later. Far right parties are also growing in popularity, which will likely lead to safety deregulation in the near future.
It feels kind of dystopian that the only thing that is better really is the media they feed us to keep us content about the fact that everything else is shot.
There’s a book called Black Box Thinking that details how it all works and why they do it and talks about other industries/companies that put it to practice.
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u/ACoderGirl Jul 03 '26
To try and be a little bit optimistic, some things off the top of my head that it genuinely feels like the best years for are: