>Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality.
This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft, factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre of "old" looking games that don't actually look old. There's even an entire world of games that look good with assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars each.
I wouldn’t mind if the game was fun. Many of my favorite games to this day have terrible graphics. A nice side effect of simple 3D forms or even 2D games is that you also don’t require a massively expensive GPU or even a dedicated GPU at all in order to play them.
This is nonsense. Very few gamers actually care about how many polygons make up each tree and that some texture in the background is 10mb compressed. Meanwhile the actual product of video games from AAA companies has stagnated immensely. You can make your game ugly as sin, and if it's actually fun, people will love it. Every indie darling is an explicit disproving of this claim. We have Minecraft, factorio, cruelty squad which is entirely built around being horrible to look at but fun to play, an entire genre of "old" looking games that don't actually look old. There's even an entire world of games that look good with assets that you can buy on an open market for a few dollars each.