By dying you must mean that most games today are shit. This is true. AAAs that pander to mindless casuals, braindead twitch/child bait like LoL/Dota/Pubg/Overwatch, extreme p2w that can only be enjoyed if you're a whale spending thousands on the game, indieshit walking simulators that care more about a political statement than fun mechanics and levels and early access shovelware that copies successful games dominate the market. The market has grown exponentially and all the normalfags who used to think games are for losers 10 years ago are now avid "gamers".
But if you look at # of good games made now vs. before, I think it's still looking about the same, maybe better. Biggest problems today are actually discovering the games (gog helps) and features being left out. IMO the most exciting modern development is explosion in tech:
>free, fully featured engines
>great graphics with zero effort
>languages and ides that do half the work for you
>free assets everywhere
>internet full of cheap artists
>if you are brainlet even programmers are not hard to hire
>zero cost distribution because online
>no publisher bullshit unless you want to
I do miss 2 things: We used to get AAA games made with us as the audience, which is unlikely to happen due to simple economics. And in the pre-internet age, games had to be finished, debugged, tested and polished as fuck on release because patching was so difficult. These days you can dutifully install every patch for years and the game will still not be "complete" a decade after "release", but that's not to say it won't necessarily have a lot of playable content, sometimes more than was possible earlier.
Most recent game I played was Xenonauts, which I think is a great example of everything I said above. Note, it clearly has minor flaws and incomplete bits that 20 years ago would have been fixed in development, but it is miles ahead of the typical ea garbage that's so unfinished you're lucky if it even runs at all.
And not to defend DLC but it does provide a way to breathe new life into games that were good but played out. Don't Starve is not a great game but I really enjoyed it 6 years ago. Since then, they've released major content updates that basically redid the whole game, so I was able to come back to it even though I had pretty much explored everything it had to offer in initial release.
Obviously the biggest thing we could do is make our own games, or fund them. But those take time and money, I'm sure most people shitposting on this board have neither. As a low effort option, the single most useful thing would probably be organizing our own games journalism for lack of a better term: News about notable new games or updates to old ones, reviews that honestly evaluate the game without proselytizing or shilling, and so on. Threads on /v/ would work, our own sites would be even better. Right now a lot of this is quality commentary is in Youtube channels, but they get a handful of subs/views so you have the same problem where good content is flooded with shit and discovery is impossible. People should stop chasing adshekels that they'll never get (only way to make money from YT imo is to have millions of views which means utterly dumbing yourself down and cucking to mainstream) and move to platforms where they are not flooded, and can benefit from network effects.