Call me old fashioned but I miss the old days when shit like this would take decades to discover and even then it would be shrouded in doubt and mystery.

You are old fashioned, but also wrong. In the old days there were gaming guides sold alongside games that provided the same information that players can get on youtube. Only a few games have had secrets revealed years after they came out.

The youtube full of ads and sponsors is crappier though, if you don't just block them.

Still trying to catch that mew under the car near the SS Anne

And then there's Noita, in which people have put in serious cryptographic effort over years trying to decipher the last two puzzles and yet no answers are forthcoming because the game was conjured by druids and ancient Finnish forest spirits

If you read the article, this isn't a rarest ending like the headline says. There is an ending playing as Lae'zel most players don't take because it's a bad ending that obviously ends the story. The ending being talked about is a hacked ending that was maybe an idea at one point to get to the above ending via an alternative path, but wasn't ultimately implemented. I wouldn't even call this an ending frankly. It's more "there's some game files that can lead to each other if X or Y is marked, but actually can't because Z being marked cuts that path off". More of a glitch than anything.

Datamining is the worst except in the cases where it just becomes more of a mystery. Like "we know there's this scene in the game and it doesn't appear to be cut, but we can't figure out how to get to it without hacking yet." Like the Nuclear Disarmament cutscene in MGS5. It was found pretty early on, but nobody was sure how it worked until enough people worked together to dismantle every single nuke on the platform for the game (IIRC PlayStation did it first).

When I was your age, I'd go down to the corner store where I'd drop down $2.50 for a freshly printed copy of Nintendo Power and a package of bubble-gum cigarettes when I wanted to get my ads and filler squeezed between spoilers.

If I really wanted to beat a game quick, I'd buy myself a Game Genie.

Wasn't Mew in the original Pokémon games found through data mining and only obtainable by hacking?

One of the skulls in Halo 3 was found by hackers in game scripts, a decent number of secrets in the indie game Fez were found by reverse engineering or brute force. Not to mention game guides in even older days.

So no it's not really always been "shrouded in doubt and mystery".

You're old fashioned. :)

Toasty!

It's the data diving that's really ruined the fun of this. You can't hide anything in a game now because for a legion of hackers, exposing every locked or hidden thing in new releases is the game. I think that's why so many indie games that want to have deep hidden content end up making ARGs, so you only have to put hints in the game and the solution is on your website or in a geocache or something. Then the worst the data miners can do is dig up all the clues faster.

I also feel like part of the appeal of "lore over plot" is tied up in this. With YouTube and Twitch, it's likely that more people will consume your game in the form of "lore analysis" videos than will ever play your game.

If your game just tells a straightforward plot, then a 12 hour commented Let's Play is going to eat some amount of people who might otherwise play your 60 hour game. I definitely found Whitelight's 7 hour walk through of Death Stranding a lot more interesting than playing it.

With the lore-heavy games, there's no consensus story to spoil so everyone can make their own 10 hour long interpretation of what Goldmask's finger positioning implies about the elden lord's dining habits. It feeds a whole speculative video ecosystem and encourages people to play the games and "decide for yourself" what it all means.