I'm having the opposite experience. I dropped probably $400 on games over the holidays and found three games I wanted to play.

I used to make games, so I hated when people used GameStop because it avoided the developers getting any money. But now I'm thinking that GameStop would be great, because most all but three of the games I bought just suck.

These online-purchase-only systems frankly need a one-hour refund policy. So many games where the controls are just jank (like 100% janky). Like everyone looked at Celeste and thought "This game is good because it's hard" instead of "This game is good because it rewards skill". I'd rather play Celeste and Returnal than these other utter wastes of hard drive. I only made it through Unsighted because you can make yourself invulnerable: fun story, fun ideas, fun levels, jank combat.

Bah humbug.

Ironically, HLL is a lot closer to the original BF1942 than any other game I’ve seen recently.

Inaccurate in what way? Indie studios getting bought by Tencent is true.

Yes, the problem is that the reliance on these few engines is a worrying form of concentration in itself. Especially for the Unreal engine, which is used aggressively to push the Epic games store. How independent are they really when they're so dependent on a single software vendor?

And, to my eyes, Epic uses openly monopolistic practices: they drop the license fee for the engine if you use their game store.