Nah, there's nothing wrong with hype. You should be able to be excited for a game, it's the game industry's fault we can't be hyped anymore because of all those reasons you said.

Online multiplayer Ever since they added the feature to play with friends online Gaming developers realized that players would spend shit load of time in that one feature so they don't make the story mode. [spoiler]im looking at you Star Wars battlefront and rainbow six siege [/spoiler]

Reading through everything, especially the "golden age" folks, there's one common denominator that people are overlooking - the ubiquitousness of high speed internet. There's a difference between hype and anticipation. I was eagerly anticipating Witcher, Fallout, a couple of others. It didn't verge on getting on the hype train, though, because I rarely went to the plethora of clickbait gaming sites trying to learn more. And those sites need to make outrageous claims to get the clicks to get their revenue. Of course there wasn't this level of hype back in the "good old days" because people's worlds were very,very small in comparison, you only heard hype from the circle of assholes you called your friends, game stores, and the occasional random. And if one of them steered you wrong twice, you didn't listen to their opinion after that. Now you've got literally thousands of anonymous assholes making outrageous claims, most of the time without giving any justification. And people listen, they're far too lazy to read anything longer than a couple bullet points. The internet also completely changed the distribution structure. Of course there weren't microtransactions and DLCs back in the "good old days" - there was no way to charge for or distribute them. You also couldn't easily add anything on to a cartridge, nor could you fix a buggy one. And going back to this whole hype thing, in order for people to stand above the white noise of the internet they have to take polemic positions, whether they believe it or not. There seems to be no middle ground, everything is "amazing!!!!!!" or "sucks balls!!!!!!". Bah. Enough. tl;dr - tl;dr is part of the fvcking problem....

The industry's current obsessive behavior of looking for the newest and most clean hyper-realistic graphics that can run at the highest FPS. This in turn requires larger teams of game developers which costs more money, but with a game price cap limit of $60 they have to make up for the cost some where. So bye-bye complete and whole game and hello to cut-content and cut features (and people still question why Destiny shipped without CTF). Simply sell the mangled remains of the game for $60 and then introduce DLC for the cut content and mircro-transaction thereafter. (Why do you think the Internet has made memes illustrating games and DLC from 10 years ago to what it looks like now?) This then breeds lazy game design, because if you can make it look better than your competitors then that's all you need to get your game published instead of the other guy. What's in the game? Who cares! As long as it looks the shiny-est and you hype it up till you can't any more. Then simply sweep the annoying portion of the player base that complains that this is unacceptable behavior under the rug and you are good. Finally tell the community at large that the game has an evolving world that will be updated frequently to keep the fanbase's hopes high. If you can successfully trick your fanbase into thinking that greatness is just on the horizon then they will continue to throw money at the screen. This has been my lesson on how you become a great AAA game studio. Good luck to all you game studios aspiring to reach that AAA rank.

Well you are not too far off from the truth,but its actualy the amount of money spend to create that hype to begin with Marketing of AAA games is almost as expensive as developing the game increasing the costs,and in some cases creating a loss when sales are disapointing *cough'Tomb Raider'cough*. This is one of the main reasons that,if things keep going this way,the game market will eventualy crash. The other two reasons are overpriced/day one DLC and console exclusivity deals.

Idk, hype doesn't cause a game to have a $50 season pass when it releases with little content. I think it's all of the above

DLC

Micro transactions

When developers/gamers started focusing more on how much "stuff" one could unlock...and stopped focusing on the "fun" factor of just playing the game.

That includes devs and publishers then

[i] *puts on an antic disposition* [/i] Console exclusives.

Entitled millennials