I've long grown out of playing games. Coding games and tools is a different thing all together, I remain fully interested and stuck with coding mobile games and wouldn't choose a different hobby/career (well apart from the fact that I long to improve my coding skills, and my maths and physics knowledge)

But playing games, these days (unlike over a decade ago) genuinely bores me to death. I guess I always feel I am coding for the younger generation, similar to enjoying making toys for kids but not enjoying playing with the toys yourself

I'm coding mobile games at the moment and I look at and play some few just for gameplay analysis and checking current standards and features but not because I enjoy playing them

I know this certainly makes me an odd-ball here, but just wondering how far an odd-ball I am. Is there a few... maybe just one more person like me here OR just me? (if the latter then I have to make sadder clown face )

Maybe you're just playing wrong games

I can easily relate. Only game I have played in the past fifteen years is Starcraft 2.

I even have an XBox One (mainly for dev purposes) and have probably spent 10 minutes in total playing it. Even have games still in their shrink wrap.

I can absolutely agree. Me & my friends just talked about that, feels like the Game Industry is running out of ideas. Everything just plays similar.
They constantly improve in graphics (which is cool, I really like nice graphics) but it feels like they're going backwards in creativity & gameplay.
I bought a ps4 2 years ago & have only played a few hours since.

I don't play many games because I don't have any free  time any more

When I do manage to find a spare hour, I usually play a multiplayer game online with a friend to slightly count towards my social needs too...

My tastes have definitely changed - I used to love extremely long / slow single player games where you might waste an hour simply planning what to do next, (fallout, elder scrolls, flashpoint/arma campaigns, original R6, etc), but now prefer refined repayable multiplayer modes that are easy to fit a known experience into a particular block of time (starcraft, arma multiplayer, R6 siege, etc). 

4 hours ago, grumpyOldDude said:

But playing games, these days (unlike over a decade ago) genuinely bores me to death.

Yeah, me too. But i'm not sure if it's my age or the current state of games.

I've had a similar time 7-8 years back, then i've discovered the game Penumbra (predecessor of Amnesia), and this game was so awesome i really gained a lot of motivation again.

At the moment there are quite a few games around that i think are very good, but nothing stands out. It has always been like this - mostly. The best times are when there is a leap in technology that pushes new ideas / genres, but what could come up next? VR alone seems not quite enough.

But younger people seem to be still excited about games. They dress like Overwatch characters, football players do a Switch pose after a goal... Seems there is more interest than ever, although we've had games that were so much better in the old days than actual ones, right?

However, if i play games they constantly appear too big and too complex for no reason. Boring huge open worlds, pages of UI to level up your character, dozens of things you need to know. This is true not for all but often for very popular and sucessfull titles. I totally do not understand how people enjoy this and have enough time - this is where i really feel old

Maybe it's just you grew out of your old thing and haven't yet found your new thing (after all, people change).  Maybe it's because the industry has stagnated and the same old same-old gets a little tiresome even if it puts lipstick on and offers to wear something silky.

I've been playing games on computers since the 1970s when I was first exposed to Colossal Cave.  I have gone years without playing anything, then some new tech comes along to enable newer experiences and I'm back again.  You can hit burnout though, and need to rest and recover.

Like most entertainment industries, there are exploitation phases and exploration phases (eg. the Disco and the Postpunk phases in the music industry of the late 1970s).  Right now, the games industry is definitely in an exploitation phase in which clones of past successes are released by cynical entrepreneurs to milk the market while they can.  Just wait, he pendulum will swing and some indies will start exploring new and exciting ways to make the computer entertain you anew.

Mean time, put down the controller and do something else for a while.  A break is as good as a change.

I am quite of an oddball like yourself.  I don't own any modern console.  Last one that I am still using is a PS3 for Netflix and media center.  My laptop is running Linux.  So I would only play mobile games now, but even that is limited to one game at a time.  If I got into a game, I would endlessly play that game for a few months straight, and really get into it.  But once I quit, I delete it and never look back.  Right now I am playing none, and the bar is set pretty high for me to get into any game now.

I am somewhat jealous of my gamer friends, or reading the threads on /r/gaming.  I can't seem to get into it much because most games nowadays are quite demanding of your time, and also money thanks to freemium and DLC.  Yet, somehow they still find that joy of gaming.

I can rarely get into games these days.  I enjoy thinking about what my game could be then actually seeing what other games are.  Maybe twice to three times a year I'll lose a weekend or maybe even a week to a game.

Hmm, I still do waste a fair bit of time on Games, though not nearly as much as I used to and I tend to play a lot less games.. like at the moment for the past few weeks I've only really played Rimworld and PUBG, most of my time is spent working though.. and then I get home an just wanna sleep

But yeah, my desire to play games is much less now as I struggle to find a game that really like captivates and keeps my interest