[vlunkr]

Yeah I think that individual retro games can be incredible and stand the test of time. For me Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are timeless. As a whole though, it’s hard to measure. Today we have microtransactions, in the past we had games that threw in one bullshit level so you couldn’t beat it during a rental. (Lookin at you battletoads) and bad movie tie-ins, lazy arcade ports, etc. There’s always going to be trash.

One thing retro games obviously don’t have is hindsight. Shovel Knight feels like the best NES games, but lacks crap like lives and continues, because it learned from later games like Dark Souls that you can make death punishing without making it un-fun. Hollow knight builds on my favorite games with a couple of decades of lessons on how to make platformers more interesting and less frustrating.

[itsmek]

The difference between microtransaction today and trash in the past is that the old games achieved success by not being trash. Yes trash existed but it was generally not successful and the market generally rewarded quality so the money and dev effort went into quality games. Today the money is made by gacha games so that's where the effort goes. Not the same imo.

[vlunkr]

There was plenty of movie tie-in shovelware that sold well. ET is obviously the infamous example, but this continued to go on into the 3D era. Sports games too. They aren't universally bad, but often they succeeded just because they have the official license. It's just like any kind of media, bad stuff can succeed because of deceptive marketing or slapping a familiar name on garbage.

This is all a vast oversimplification. There are obviously hundreds of games coming out every year without gacha mechanics.