We used to get plenty of garbage, too, it’s just not remembered. Nobody is thinking fondly of the Pixar’s
Bolt DS game (or all the other licensed shitty games on the DS/Wii era that you could walk in and find everywhere). My local Dollar General AND Target still can’t sell them!
Games on the level of Deus Ex, Half Life, Thief, many old JRPGs, or old isometric RPGs like Fallout aren’t gonna be made again because they were lighting in a bottle, not because games were generally better.
The slop we get now has risen to the AAA-budget level but in 10 years nobody is going to look back on the story of Assassins Creed Shadows or whatever. Very good chance they remember Yakuza 7 or Red Dead Redemption 2 though.
The real issue is games that have good stories tend to be in the genre she hates cause she can't into JRPGs with the smol rabbit brain
JRPGs, AA titles, mods, and non-ideologically-captured indies. Especially if her requirement is pre-2010, which is 15 years ago! There’s a lot that’s come out since then, a whole bounty out there if you open your tastes.
Want story? Xenoblade is pretty great.
Want gameplay? Then play Sifu, one of the most engaging games ever.
If you can’t get into a genre, that’s expected of human taste. Everything is not for everyone, but these genres are very much the best in the industry when it comes to storytelling, and they still do it. Studios doing the immersive sims went under because people didn’t like them enough to sell, no matter how
good they were. Same here, less popular, less known than the slop, but still the best without the same advantage of surviving the slop quite yet.
Like anime has replaced cartoons, manga replaced comics, independent development being able to outshine AAA development.