I disagree. You’re comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it’s in orbit.
An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.
A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.
When people say the “care and polish” isn’t there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren’t getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.
It’s like anything… Think about how many people ride bicycles. Now go to ANY online community where people talk about cycling; it will likely be the most insufferably pedantic assholes you can imagine.
99% of people who buy video games don’t identify as “gamers”, they don’t read gaming media, and they certainly don’t interact with gaming discussion online.
As both an industry professional (former), and a self-identified gamer, I stopped giving a shit what “core gamers” had to say 10 years ago.