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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Can you define "golden age of video games"?
When Factorio was injected into my dopamine receptors. Time has been a blur ever since.
Gamecube-PS2-Xbox 360 Era. It was a time when game developmental costs had come down a bit, the demand for games was pretty steady, and the market wasn't oversaturated. It allowed AAA devs to make some big creative swings and return a steady profit.
There's a lot of different genres that are popular today where you can point to a game from that era as the progenitor. Stuff like Resident Evil 4 for the third person action shooter, Devil May Cry for spectacle RPGs, Katamari Damacy and Pikmin for uh...whatever the hell they are.
I don't think AAA has ever been as creative as they were during that period. For over a decade now, pretty much all creativity in games has come from indies, with AAA being comprised of copycats.
The original Xbox was the contemporary of Gamecube and PS2, not 360.
for some reason I always think the 360 came out much earlier than it really did.
god has it really been two decades?
Two decades and two months!
The time when OP was a kid/teenager and nostalgia hits the hardest.
The period during which working in game development could be considered somewhat theoretically reasonable to pursue as a career.
It has been plenty unreasonable to work for AAA game companies for a long time. Long crunch, layoffs between projects, abuse by managers has been widespread for like 15 years at least. And attempts to remedy these issues with collective bargaining has been met with obvious union busting for several years at least.
Perhaps your definition of a golden age existed and had ended, but if so the end was longer ago than you think and we're watching the end of an inevitable decline. You also have to compare this to everyone else's conditions. The fact "gig economy" is even in our lexicon should show how unstable tons of people's employment and income are.
I don't really disagree with this sentiment, my point is we risk losing the essential narrative of why what will occur or arguably already has occurred if we don't continually reemphasize the actual issue.