Regardless, I still stand by my statement. The quality of games in number (Not percentage), regardless of your taste and preferences are increasing. Graphics are improving, writing quality (IMV) are improving.
I agree generally, but I'd counter that the % of good games has fallen off dramatically. It's just infinitely easier to enter the space. There are devs putting out more than one "game" per week that the mods here refuse to let you call out for being shovelware. I'm not sure which is worse, the games or the mods deciding you can't be critical of asset flips and call them out for what they are.
I mean I look at some of the classics that were the most popular back in the day, and I compare them to what is currently out there, and the current games are just better in a lot of aspects. For instance, compare Dr Pink's 2 games. The second one is objectively better than the first. Even if you don't like his games.
DPC has fallen off. He's more focused on creating his mini-games than releasing quality, functional content. And the fans in the BAD thread would still suck his cock if he dipped it in radioactive shit. They're more focused on telling people how they're wrong, that you didn't end up on a broken ass path than even consider that the game has gotten beyond what he can manage on his own. I literally did not encounter a couple of conversations that would explain events at the end of the current update and some how its my fault on an unmodded, untouched save that the game skipped vital conversations. Not DPC, who released an update that even a huge portion of his community is unhappy with and finding bugs in.
I agree, there are new devs rising to replace the existing stable. And that in itself is creating its own problem. The devs they look up to, like DPC, have led them to believe it's acceptable to spend MONTHS developing mini-games their communities hate rather than focusing that time on the actual game. Or that its ok when they go full time to only produce 40% more content per update while taking more than twice as long between updates. Or that its ok to take 5 months off due to a death in the family, spend 2 months trying to figure out how to code again, spend more than a month fucking with an existing mini-game, and start fucking with the code of an upcoming mini-game bc... reasons. Or that its ok to take more than a month off in anticipation of receiving a new prebuilt workstation that you could've built yourself, had 10x the warranty protections, saved half the money and had completely assembled within 3 days. Oh, and then wasted a week while you wait for the generic PSU cable to arrive, which you can literally use the power cable from an 80s Apple w/o voiding the warranty bc that fucking cable will still be easily capable of handling the power draw of pc's 50yrs from now.
I'll get excited to see a new game that came out a year or so ago, look at the devs Patreon to see that they've taken 3 vacations between August and November. That dev quit their job to go full time, but if things don't pan out has a deadline to return to work that's like 6 months later. Said dev only intends to get one update out within that window meaning they will have taken a year to get a single update out, despite having gone full time and hiring someone to help out. They expect boom or bust despite having shown they're not willing to put the work in to make the game as successful as it deserves.
Or how about the devs that allow the whales to dictate and troll them, destroying their games? "Hey, lets weight peoples vote based on how much money they give us, not like that could ever be abused!" And I've yet to see a single situation where that has NOT been the situation. I've seen it completely destroy prominent developers. And more and more developers are doing it by the day where even in the least egregious cases it has led to fan backlash. Even personally, if a dev gave me that much power I'd try to sway things in what I think is the best direction, but I still admit I'd try to influence things to fuck with people now and then, too. And in the case of Intertwined, that's precisely what's happened.
I'd also point out that like 70% of the updates I've seen recently have intentionally refused to progress the actual plot at all. Relationships aren't being advanced, the stories aren't going any where, and some people have been waiting/paying for 2 years for literally nothing to happen. And that's from the most prominent VN devs, both old and new. Or an episode ends on cliffhanger - next episode, everything is immediately resolved. New episode then ends on another cliffhanger, with the plot only having advanced immediately past the last cliffhanger. That might seem suspenseful as you wait for the updates, but in 2-3 updates that's just going to piss off every single new player.
Guys like DPC could easily hire teams to work under him on other projects while assisting him on BAD. There are countless outside influences that could destroy this industry, but the unprofessional behavior is the one that is guaranteed if it doesn't change. And, today, it's the most influential developers that are getting away with the worst behavior. The Radiant community is completely fucking toxic in a negative way. Yet the communities of other games are prime examples of toxic positivity. It's the same shit we saw in the 2010s with every game being released a buggy mess and anyone that mentioned it got attacked and silenced immediately. That would finally change a few years ago, but now developers have had a decade of being walled off from ALL criticism and now that everyone is fed up, they can't get away from the negativity. Why the AVN space is on this path might be a different reason, but the outcome is just as inevitable. As fans, we should never support behavior that is against our own self-interests. This is still a business. We've seen platforms like Kickstarter implode from this exact same behavior. And here we are, once again, supporting it.