I wonder if part of the reason games used to be so much better was because there was a barrier to entry-- only serious people need apply.

I'm a professional software developer, and I couldn't make heads or tails of the Atari 7800 "Joust" source code. Whereas these days, even "designers with little-to-no engineering experience" can build games. Yipee.

So, games designed for the love of it by a small subset of elite, hardcore engineers in the 70s through the mid-90s writing assembler and C, versus games today designed by marketers to make a quick buck with drag and drop GUIs. And just like anything that gets "democratized", with its reverse Midas touch, gaming turned to shit.