The timing of this move makes me want to never buy another game from Activision (or Microsoft, by extension). Just such a blatant exploitation of the community.
Like, half of the NES library is games riddled with bugs, or they are licensed games where the devs barely knew what they were doing so they just cranked out a piece of software that barely qualifies as a game. I’m not talking about the games that we remember. If you remember an NES game, even if you remember it as bad, I am 99% certain it isn’t one of the dogshit games I’m thinking of. I’m not talking about like, Excitebike or Bubble Bobble or whatever. Those are classics, even if they’ve aged poorly. I’m talkin games like, Fester’s Quest, or Mickey Mousecepade, or Jordan vs. Bird: One-on-One, or Time Lord. Games where just playing them feels bad.
The “floor” for how bad a bad game can be has gone up as the generations have gone on. There’s always a few stinkers, but most PS2 games are objectively better than like half of the NES library.
xDefiant has a class with an invisibility skill (which lets one do plenty of shotgunning losers in the back)? Apex Legends has Mirage with various decoy and invisibility skills? idk, I don’t know every single one of these shooters, but I will grant you that the way the Spy works in TF2 is pretty unique.
By tf2 are you referring to Team Fortress 2? I feel like every shooter these days is a class-based shooter, what sets tf2 apart from something like Overwatch?
the theory i hear a lot is that live service games are a big source of this sales slump. If you only play Fortnite, COD, and Madden, you haven’t had a reason to upgrade yet because those games play fine on the current consoles. Even Madden 25 is coming out on PS4 still. Word is that College Football 25 is actually giving the PS5 a decent sales bump, because it is (1) the first college football game to come out in a decade, and (2) the first EA football game that is exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann work through and rank the NES library over the past year, and I agree with your sentiment. It seems like there are only like 10-20 NES games that actually hold up, and the rest of the library is either “good for the era” or absolute garbage.