>>235 (OP)
TLDR: it's over.
It's due to multiple things combined.
People having less and less time for games due to irl responsibilities is normal. I myself dropped gaming for years because I went to college and just lost interest because I had other shit to do in the meantime.
Then you have the fact that everyone is now sitting in their chat group/discord server with a couple of dudes, nobody wants to interact with anyone else, it's just a bunch of atomized safespaces that don't interact with each other in any way. This is partially why even full lobbies of games that were notorious for people talking random shit (cod is a perfect example of this I think) are now a wasteland. I remember someone putting it kinda this way: the seventh generation of gaming was just enough connectivity and technology to be able to play at your home with people living somewhere on a random place on the globe, yet there was still incentive to go to someone's place or play games in couch coop or even go to a store to buy your games where you could meet other autists like you.
None of that is relevant anymore.
If you pay attention close enough we might be living through a second shift where talking to LLM chatbots on your phone instead of real people would become the norm, and the implications and applications in gaming are big, no need to enter a discord server to talk with someone you know because the character in your game will reply and you won't even make up the difference.
Another angle is the modern camera culture and the fact that everyone can record anything. Essentially people don't want to act """weird""" (whatever that means now) so this is why they would rather avoid contact or do in a very superficial manner. People in school before could get away easily with doing cringe and dumb things, now you can't, there's psychology behind it but if you know you might be observed people will change their behavioral pattern.
There are still plenty of coop games that promote this kind of interaction but it's just not as popular anymore.
>>287
Let me guess
>completed high school before covid
>remember how phones were before the iphone
>remember how internet was before the jeet invasion and social media
Essentially born '03 at the latest (with exceptions obviously), I think zoomers (I'm one) need to be separated in subgroups like this, one is more likely to be proficient with computers (probably the last generation) and more likely than not will function as a normal human and able to keep shit running than the other part
Anyway it's also kinda stupid to lump up everyone together like that, plenty of boomers who are getting their daily brainrot dose from tiktok
Like if you think about it, a kid can't just go to the store, get the latest iphone and install tiktok and whatever, it's usually shit (millennials) parents not leading by example or not doing anything to prevent that from happening (decent parental control tools existed for more than a decade at this point), you can't blame a kid for being dumb because that's the apropriate age for that