[bentley]

It feels like there was a sweet spot in between the arcade era (where gameplay was tailored to get your quarters) and the mobile era (where gameplay is tailored to get microtransactions), where game designers saw the most success by providing a complete high‐quality experience in a single purchase.

There have been exploitative home console games and non‐exploitative arcade games and mobile games, but to me the overall opposite pattern seems to hold true. Then again, perhaps I’m being blinded by nostalgia for the home console games of my childhood!

[yamtaddle]

I actually think a ton of games from the "16-bit" era up to the first generation to heavily feature online services and game downloads (PS3/Xbox360/Wii—yeah, yeah, I know even the NES had a game download system in Japan, the Dreamcast had a modem, and so on, but you know what I mean) are still damn good, and my nostalgia consoles are the Magnavox Odyssey2 (I'd not... suggest any of those games to a modern gamer without the benefit of nostalgia) and the NES (I'd advance, IDK, maybe ten or fifteen total games on there as still worth playing for sheer fun reasons, not due to historical importance or whatever, despite personally loving perhaps a hundred of them).

Like, Super Metroid is just fucking great. Timeless. That goes for a lot of those games from the early 90s through early 2000s. Symphony of the Night? A masterpiece and still absolutely worth playing. Some of the Final Fantasy games? The series has veered into a different genre, so it's hard to compare those with earlier entries, but mid-period FF games are totally on par with or better than many trad JRPG-style games still coming out. Chrono Trigger? Still excellent. Most of the Gamecube-era Nintendo multiplayer games are about as much fun as their modern versions, still. Some fighting games? Mid-period entries in those series are often better than the newer ones. And so on.

Most of those I didn't play back in the day, so I don't think nostalgia's blinding me.

[GartzenDeHaes]

It seems to me that there was pressure on game companies from Block Buster to make games that couldn't be completed in single rental period.

[bentley]

Theoretically plausible for an American developer, but it’s worth pointing out that in that era (and maybe still today) video game rental was illegal in Japan.

[frozenlettuce]

I think that's the reason for the quality of GBA games - at that time the industry already had lots of knowledge on how to create fun experiences and the hardware was capable of providing nice simple 2d graphics