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[dcx4610]

Probably now to be honest. I haven't touched my PS5 since buying it. I mostly play on PC but all of the games I'm playing are mostly a decade old and stuff I missed. There just isn't anything at all compelling to me. I think RE Village was the last new game I enjoyed. Everything feels been there, done that. Indies are the only thing keeping me interested.

 

[JimmyRustler]

For me it’s currently and since around a year. Can’t really explain it. Finished Horizon FW and then just felt tired of modern gaming. Been playing every now and then, yes, but only to kill some time. I barely enjoy it anymore.

 

[Jaybe]

From middle of SNES to late 2007 when I got a 360 and later a PS3. Was just busy with school, dating, and first professional job, more school, travel. There are acclaimed series that came out that don’t even register to me, like my first Resident Evil was 5 lol.

 

[eastcoastkody]

i remember when PSN went down for a month.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I loved it, but in a way a very limited way to game.

During the 2007 to 2010 period, all I played was COD, Mass Effect, NHL, Gears, Fallout 3. And probably dabbled with some indie filler.

My game playing probably went like this:

COD 70%
Fallout 3 10%
NHL 10%
ME 4%
Gears 4%
Indies 2%

 

[Gamer79]

Yes especially when I gamed only on n64 and GameCube.

 

[bluecowboys]

The Ps4 and Xbox one generation was Meh. I’m not liking the direction that AAA games are going with focus on the cinematic movie like experience instead of gameplay. Doesn’t help we only get a handful of AAA games.

 

[Elysion]

The current gen has been pretty underwhelming so far. Imo, it just feels like an extension of the previous gen, which in turn felt like an extension of the gen before that. Gen 7, 8 and 9 all just kind of blur together in my mind (with the exception of the Wii). For heaven‘s sake, CoD4 came out over 15 years ago, and had yearly releases ever since, yet it‘s still the biggest shooter around! The biggest single-player franchises, GTA and Elder Scrolls, last got entries during the PS360 era, which people play to this day too! Gen 7 is also when we saw the rise of ‚pixel-art‘, which is still what most indy games look like today.

At this point it feels like we‘ll never get out from under the shadow of the PS3/360. I wouldn’t call the last three gens a ‚dark era‘ of course, because there were lots of cool games I enjoyed obviously, but the last seventeen years really feel like a single era we seem to be stuck in for some reason. At this point it really seems the only way to leave that era behind is for VR to take over.

 

[pramod]

The current gen has been pretty underwhelming so far. Imo, it just feels like an extension of the previous gen, which in turn felt like an extension of the gen before that. Gen 7, 8 and 9 all just kind of blur together in my mind (with the exception of the Wii). For heaven‘s sake, CoD4 came out over 15 years ago, and had yearly releases ever since, yet it‘s still the biggest shooter around! The biggest single-player franchises, GTA and Elder Scrolls, last got entries during the PS360 era, which people play to this day too! Gen 7 is also when we saw the rise of ‚pixel-art‘, which is still what most indy games look like today.

At this point it feels like we‘ll never get out from under the shadow of the PS3/360. I wouldn’t call the last three gens a ‚dark era‘ of course, because there were lots of cool games I enjoyed obviously, but the last seventeen years really feel like a single era we seem to be stuck in for some reason. At this point it really seems the only way to leave that era behind is for VR to take over.

Funny I feel almost exactly the same way, and would have given up on console gaming by now, if it weren't for the explosion of the indie/retro game scene, and the Switch.
It's almost like we're in a gaming Renaissance right now, with the huge revival of indie and retro games.
70% of my gaming in the last 3-4 years have been Switch and indie games.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

That'd be the 7th gen consoles for me (specifically, the 360 and PS3). Those consoles were underpowered garbage and most games ran pretty poorly. Japanese development had all but completely shit the bed, Western developers were insistent on churning out shoddy open-world games and then latching onto generic military shlock to chase that Calladuty money, and we saw AAA games reduced to risk-averse cash grabs. I thought the games that came out during that era were largely terrible, and revisiting games from that era reminds me pretty quickly why I disliked it so much. PC gaming suffered, too, due to so many games being gimped so they could see a multiplatform release. I thought the consoles that followed were a massive improvement, even though it took some time for some of the bad trends of Gen 7 to really die off.

I guess the upside, though, was that was the period when I really started exploring retro gaming. That was a lot more fun.

 

[LavitzSlambert]

I decreased my time gaming immensely between 2009 and 2016 and what time I did spend switched basically fully over to PC gaming until 2017 when the Switch and PS4 really took off. I enjoyed my time away and it allowed for a lot of time with different activities, but I’m glad I returned.

 

[drganon]

I've had two Dark eras.

The first was most of the ps2/xbox/gcn era. It mostly came down to financial issues due to my parents divorce and being too young myself to get a job.

The second was toward the end of the 360/ps3/Wii era. For whatever reason, I wasn't gaming as much. I also wasn't into jrpgs and the like back then, so I was stuck with Western games.

What brought me back into gaming in a big way was Yakuza 0 and then persona 5. Since then , Ive spent more time and money gaming than I ever did in the past.

 

[gaming_again]

I didn’t play games at all from 2011 - 2015 apart from Halo 4, which only increased this non-gaming habit.

No real reason for this personal dark age, I just found other things more interesting at that time.

And I didn’t play games at all for the first year of my kid’s life (2020-2021).

My username celebrates said kid sleeping all the way through the night for the first time.

 

[gaming_again]

I’m going through this right now OP…I went through a bad break up where we miscarried a child and lost interest in a lot of things I used to enjoy. I’m finally getting out of the lull a bit, but most recent games are ass anyway. 2023 looks really bright on the gaming front, so I’m hoping to get my mojo back, not only on the gaming front, but on the dating front as well!

Good luck, friend.

 

[DCharlie]

I got to a point recently , probably the last 2 years or so, where i just didn't care about gaming like i used to - just felt there was nothing i could be bothered playing and most of the new releases just weren't doing anything for me. In truth, i was just being a bit lazy. If anything it has been Vampire Survivors that's dragged me back into gaming and now i've got the excitement back.

 

[Griffon]

PS360 was a really bad generation for me and it went on forever, while also spilling over into the first years of the PS4 era. I didn't care for all the devs chasing that Calladooty money, angry bald protags everywhere, only Nintendo DS (and somewhat PSP) providing good Japanese games and smaller experiences that weren't outright indie/XBLA. The "best games" of the generation like Bioshock felt pretty mid to me, just not my type of game.

Only since 2015 has gaming truly recovered for me, when AA games and good Japanese mainstream games made a comeback.

Yup. The era that made me mostly a PC/Handheld gamer, and even then we didn't have a lot of good stuff to play (and I had every consoles). Truly a dark age.

 

[Gate Locker]

How much is too much?

 

[SHA]

I guess it's a bit hard to define what a "dark age" is. But here are some examples:

1. When you lost interest in a certain type/genre/console of gaming.
2. When you couldn't find enough things to play, or, just wasn't sure what you wanted to play.
3. When you actually stopped gaming, or gamed much less than you used to.

For me it never got as bad as #3, but for me the sixth generation (circa 2001-2006) was a weird time in my gaming life. That period seemed like a blur when I think back about it.

It started with the death of the Dreamcast and the "demise" of my favorite publisher, Sega.
And 2001 was also a rough year for me personally, I had both family and financial hardships.
It's not like I stopped gaming completely....in 2001 I played a ton of PSO, but as 2002 started and the Dreamcast faded away, so did most of my
gaming time spent on consoles.
I picked up a GBA for Advance Wars, but it didn't hold my interest for long.
Got an XBox, but I wasn't a huge Halo fan, so I mainly used it to play more PSO and CapcomVsSNK2 online.
Then also got a Gamecube around 2003, really enjoyed it at first, but then also lost interest quickly.
And yes, I also got a PS2 eventually, but barely touched it, not being a JRPG fan and very little interest in what the PS2 had at the time.
The fact that Capcom went into a weird experimental phase and we didn't get a new RE game for a few years also didn't help.
When I think back I spent most of those years playing Starcraft on PC, and really started to get into emulation. I even bought an Astro City and started collecting arcade PCBs.

Anyway, I don't think I got back into "regular" gaming until 2007 or so, when the 360 was launched and I dived right back into fulltime console gaming.

I get it , it's depression on my part , it took me awhile to figure that I had it and no one except me noticed that, it happened between the end of 7th gen till the middle of 8th gen , I thought I was growing up back then because of losing interest basically on everything and even after that, it lasted 3 long years with the meds.

 

[SCB3]

Yep, the end of 2011 - 2013

What happened was I met my Wife, had little to no money, had my son and I kinda lost interest in a lot of games, instead Netflix had just started streaming and I got super into Films

I missed out on a lot of games there that I have since played but there is one I've never been able to get back into: Skyrim

However it was The Last of Us and GTAV that brought me back in and around my Sons First Birthday in 2013 I bought a Wii U and never looked back

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

6th gen deeply disappointed me for some reason. PAL PS2 was a travesty, Mario and Zelda were a fluke. That gen was saved by Metroid Prime, RE4 and Soul Calibur 2 as far as I’m concerned. The rest came and went. So when that gen ended, the only new platform I got until 2010 was the DS. I don’t remember gaming much at the time. I played DS and replayed some old stuff, but I was mostly off this hobby.

 

[Verchod]

I'm in one now. Most of the last six years have been a gaming drought for me.

 

[Tams]

2010 - I was on a very hard come down from an addiction to RuneScape.
Second half of 2019 - Started a new job that had shit hours and an abusive boss in a new part of the country. I had no will or energy to play. I did manage some Battlefield 1, but that's all.
Second half of 2021 - No idea why, but I just didn't play any games.

On the other hand, my 'booms':

~1999 Got an original Gameboy and a load of games from a family friend
2000 - Got Pokémon Gold as a birthday present from a family friend. Also got Age of Empires II.
2002 - Got a GBA from my mother (while on a long airport layover)
2003 - Got Pokémon Sapphire
2005 - Age of Empires III
2006 - My dad got me a DS Lite.
2010 (yeah, contradiction) - Preordered a 3DS.
2014 - Got around to getting a Wii U - loved it. Hosted a Mario Kart and Smash Bros party which was fantastic.
2015 - Splatoon.
2016 - Battlefield 1.
2017 - Switch. I have especially fond memories of playing 1-2 Switch with friends.

 

[22:22:22]

I'm in one now. Most of the last six years have been a gaming drought for me.

How come?

 

[22:22:22]

Its comes and goes with me. Depressed: nothings fun. Feeling ok? Sure. With Gran Turismo 7 and Demons Souls I'm all in again. Feels bad because I just started to get into some other games and on here people helped me a lot but their on the back burner.

 

[Punished Miku]

I've never had a period like that honestly. Without Nintendo I would have had multiple periods like this, but their handhelds and experimental systems ended up filling in the droughts.

Now indies are flourishing like never before and are picking up more of the droughts.

VR kept me busy for a few months.

Mainstream AAA gaming has consistently declined and takes up less of my time each gen. Most major publishers I have not purchased a game from them in over a decade (Activision, EA, Ubisoft).

 

[Havoc2049]

There was a time, between like 1991-1996, where I was on the extreme edges of the mainstream gaming culture. While most people were gaming on the Genesis, SNES and PC, my main computer and gaming devices were an Atari 1040STE, Atari Lynx and the Atari Jaguar/Jag CD. I had fun and actually gamed a decent amount, was a member of an Atari computer user group and deep into Lynx and Jag communities, but most gamers would call it a dark age. Looking back, it was actually kinda interesting to be part of the dying Atari scene.

I finally got a PC, a Sega CDX on clearance and then a Sega Saturn and was back into more of the mainstream.

 

[tusharngf]

Couple years ago I started prepping for interviews to get an high paying job I stopped gaming for 3 months that was really hard for me to do. Even sold my brand new rtx3070 for that and ps pro as well. Then I got the job and started gaming again.

 

[Dr.D00p]

The 2006-2013 Xbox 360/PS3 era truly were dark times for PC gamers.

I only got through it by playing Mods of games I already owned.

 

[64bitmodels]

I finally got a PC, a Sega CDX on clearance and then a Sega Saturn and was back into more of the mainstream.

how the fuck????

you better have sold that, CDXs are rare asf

 

[SmokedMeat]

Never had a dark time, but the big videogame crash probably was one if there ever was.
Consoles were done in the US, so in that regard I was just playing what I had while enjoying other interests.

We still had arcades and it was then that I got a Commodore 64, and played on that. A big bonus was sharing floppies loaded with games, with classmates .

 

[Rudius]

During my college years. No money, no job, in Brazil where gaming is expensive, during the PS3 generation. I played only a few games from that era in the early 2010s on PC and later some remasters on PS4. I basically went from PS2 to PS4.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

With me as I tend to only play one game at a time, say I finish something epic like Witcher 3 that I’ve got 100+ hours in I sometimes find it hard to start something new and being underpowered and under levelled etc.

Depends if you play them but like in assassins creed where you see the red skulls above enemies and you know you’ll die but come back 40 hours later to that area and you wipe the floor with them kind of thing.

 

[Regginator]

Between 2004 and 2011, I basically only played GTA Vice City San Andreas. Couldn't have cared less about gaming then. Was in my second year of college when I heard all my classmates talk about this weird-ass sounding game about killing dragons or whatever. Sky-something. For unrelated reasons, my brother and I decided to get a PS3 to play some casual FIFA, and we happened to stumble upon aforementioned dragon game. The back of the box looked and sounded dope, and that was when my passion for gaming got rekindled. Since then I've played tons of better games, both mechanically as well as narratively, but Skyrim will forever remain in my heart.

 

[Warnen]

I stopped playing games for years right after 360 came out. Came back around when mass effect 3 came out and caught up on the good stuff.

 

[ssringo]

I spent nearly a decade playing only World of Warcraft. The addiction was real and it was bad.

On the flip side there was a lot of incredible games waiting for me when I finally managed to quit.

 

[NightmareFarm]

I didn't game much in 2018 compared to surrounding years.

 

[Danknugz]

there were a couple times i tok mushroom chocolates and went into this state of nothingness where like everything was boring and no game i played was interesting. fortunately it only really lasted the duration of the trip. i really don't like shrooms for the most part.

 

[DragonNCM]

2002 Quitted playing racing games.
2015 Quitted playing FPS games.

 

[Havoc2049]

how the fuck????

you better have sold that, CDXs are rare asf

Right place right time. I remember when the CDX launched and there was a stack of them at Electronics Boutique, but they were pretty expensive at launch. When I finally got mine, Sega was transitioning to the Saturn, and the Genesis line was becoming the budget alternative and all the Sega CD and 32X stuff was being liqudated.

I still have it.

 

[Knightime_X]

Probably around mIRC, aol, and yahoo chatroom era.
When it came to home consoles I would rather talk online, with randoms even.
As chaotic as it was, I regret nothing. Fun af

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I wonder how many “game journalists” go through similar phases. And whether they’re just reviewing from the perspective of how much they expect others to enjoy the game rather than describing their own experiences.

 

[BennyBlanco]

This year has been pretty bad. Started off strong with Elden Ring and Vampire Survivors then fell off. Tekken 7 is probably my most played game of the year lol.

 

[cireza]

Wii/PS3/360 was a time of true suffering. HD TVs were utter shit (they still are, to a lesser degree), these consoles barely outputted 720p and ridiculous framerates. Reliability was as low as it got. Wii was a joke and people were plugging it to HD TVs lol...

Worst period for me, but definitely the best for ophthalmologists and opticians.

 

[Roberts]

It's hard to remember times like these when you have so much fun playing all kinds of great gems on Game Pass™ at the moment.

 

[fart town usa]

Yea, I went from gaming all the time as a kid, getting consoles at launch, going to Funcoland, etc. My brother and I had a PS2 at launch but he left for the Army in 2001 and took it with him. I didn't game much then outside of THPS2 on the N64 cause we traded in the PSX when we got the PS2. I then bought a gamecube but hardly used it and then got a Wii at launch. I got a PS3 in 2008 and that's when it dawned on me that I had been missing out big time over the prior 7 or so years. Going strictly GCN then Wii kept me in the dark on so many things, I felt like a complete idiot, lol.

Going from Wii to PS3 also clued me into just how awful Nintendo had become as a developer/console maker.

 

[cireza]

Right place right time. I remember when the CDX launched and there was a stack of them at Electronics Boutique, but they were pretty expensive at launch. When I finally got mine, Sega was transitioning to the Saturn, and the Genesis line was becoming the budget alternative and all the Sega CD and 32X stuff was being liqudated.

I still have it.

Awesome. Never part from it.

 

[kiphalfton]

Over the past ~15 years I've played maybe 4-5 games per year on average (i.e. somewhere between 60-75 games total in that time). And I don't play multiplayer stuff or games that have no end game. Generally stuff that is only 20 hours max.

I'd say it's so low because there were some years I don't think I played really anything (i.e. maybe 1-2 games) and then some years I played a bit more (6-7 games).

Crazy to think on average I've played about 20-30 minutes per day. I'm on my phone about 10 times that easily.

 

[acm2000]

i quit gaming for a couple of years or so during the ps2 era, i grew out of japanese art styles/games and the ps2 was just full of them so lost interest, eventually rejoined the gaming world with the 360 in early 2008 and loved the shit out of that era, skipped xbo/ps4 completely and then ended up with a gaming laptop.

now im a filthy casual who plays 95% of my games on game pass xcloud on an nvidia shield tv.

 

[Humdinger]

Oh sure, especially in the sense of losing interest. I go through that all the time. I periodically spend months away from gaming, sometimes up to a year. There have also been long stretches of time, going on for many years, in which my interest in gaming gradually trails off. Eventually, something always brings it back, but then it's only a matter of time before I lose interest again.

I was very interested in gaming about 10 years ago. Now I'd say it's an occasional interest. To me, there's nothing bad about that. I would be a little concerned about myself if I spent as much time on gaming and gaming forums as I did in the past. When the interest fades, I just let it. It comes back eventually.

 

[gaming_again]

Really interesting replies - great job, OP