Originally Posted by
Flojomojo
Get on mobile (iOS and to a somewhat lesser extent, Android), Steam, and Kickstarter. Indie developers without a lot of development money are mixing things up in interesting ways, many of which will never make it to consoles. Terrific indie games come out for the Vita all the time. Humble Bundles deliver lots of curated fun for as little as a dollar per week.
We have it better than any classic era could ever dream of ... we have two active and vibrant big-name handhelds, three big-name consoles, two aged but still-interesting consoles, myriad tablets and phones that can do amazing things, and if you still want to play old games, you can get a handheld or a laptop computer for around $200 that can easily play anything up to and including Dreamcast and Windows games. That's about $88 in 1984 money, and $133 in 1996 money.
We have network and storage options that can transmit and keep thousands of games for pennies a day, and multiplayer communities around the world so there's always someone to play with. If you're really lazy, you can just watch people play games on Twitch and YouTube. If you want to create your own games, development tools like Unity are powerful and cheap, and don't require multi-thousand dollar development workstations. Somewhere in the middle is the rich modding community, who have remade games like Skyrim into anything they want it to be.
Real VR is coming soon, but even so, we have large, cheap, high resolution flat panel displays, a plethora of good wireless controller options, surround sound, and great tech everywhere. A single $30 microSD card can hold the entire MAME catalog in addition to all the Star Wars games on GOG.
Anyone who complains about "games these days" just shows a lack of imagination and exploratory spirit. The technology and innovation behind even the worst MMORPG of 2015 is way ahead of anything we could have imagined in the age of Colecovision. If you don't like what you see, go make something better, because it's never been easier to do so.