Buying games is no longer fun. Modern digital shops are awful.

A lot of people have written blog posts or articles about falling out of love with gaming, or how modern games just don't hit like they used to. This is not a post about that. Like anyone else my interest in gaming ebbs and flows, and I think this year has been kind of disappointing so far for the most part, but Donkey Kong Bananza, like Astro Bot last year, demonstrated that when the right game comes along I can still have plenty of fun with it, and there's plenty of other stuff I'm interested in coming out.

Instead I want to talk about how bad the game shopping experience has become. When digital stores first became a real thing, with Steam and then the console digital stores, I absolutely loved buying stuff from them. It wasn't just the novelty of being able to buy a game at 2 AM and download and play it right then, it was all the bells and whistles those shops provided. From the famous Nintendo Wii Shop Channel music to Microsoft's "everything gets a demo" policy to Steam and Sony's absolutely ridiculous deep discount and flash sales, I spent a bunch of money I probably wouldn't have just because the shopping experience was so fun and exciting. It was relatively easy to sort through new releases and weekly sales, there were often excellent sales to be had, most games only had one or two editions, and it was all pretty managable.

In 2025 none of this is the case.

It is bizarre to me how much worse the shops have gotten. You'd expect 20+ years to have led to a better shopping experience but instead things have taken a hard turn in the opposite direction. The modern e shops mostly suck. Xbox is in perhaps the best place, since it hasn't significantly changed its shop layout in a long time and it's mostly functional, but even then the search function isn't perfect and it has the same issues of floods of trash "games" that every other shop has. Nintendo's shop was notoriously bad on the Switch and while the Switch 2 shop is snappier and they've taken some steps to address the problem of spam games dominating all the charts, it's still a mess to navigate and the discount charts are crammed full of garbage games. The PlayStation webstore STILL doesn't have screenshots or trailers on the website (only on the console) and has searching issues and trash game issues. Any weekly sales are absolutely stuffed full of AI "games" and trophy "games" and other garbage to the point where they're an absolute chore to sort through. Price drops are also much less and extremely repetitive, with games regularly going on sale for the same 50-75% off for years on end but never going deeper than that.

Additionally we're dealing with issues like the same games releasing over and over with multiple different editions, confusing bundles, a big reduction in cross buy across multiple platforms in the same family (e.g. PS4 and PS5 or Switch 1 and 2), and just a generally more hostile experience.

Even Steam has recently been dealing with delistings caused by a tiny evangelical group attacking its credit card processor, but has also seen a reduction in ridiculously low priced sales and has had the deluge of crap problem so long that it's almost not worth commenting on.

Game shopping on digital shops has become a chore that people often use multiple outside sites to manage, and that isn't fun or engaging anymore. I've actually been spending less this year just because I'm so tired of it, which is probably a good thing overall but speaks to how bad things have gotten. I don't understand why every major company wants its digital store experience to be like a 2010s K-Mart, just dirty and barely managed with no good prices and zero thought put into product selection. It couldn't possibly take more than one or two people to weed garbage games out of sales or at least shove them to the back of the sale in the default sort order. It can't be that hard to put screenshots and trailers on a website.

Does this way really make more money? Not from me.

The decline of the digital shopping experience may not feel like a big deal but I think it's symptomatic of how a lot of gaming design has lost its way and seems divorced from the average customer experience. I think it's the same mentality that leads to disasters like Concord or has Destiny 2 selling people expansions and then removing them from play because the developers couldn't be bothered to build a functional development environment. Gaming is so much more of a hassle than it used to be, with games constantly bugging you for microtransactions or shoving advertising in your face, or just screwing around too much with balancing and small, unnecessary, tweaks. That's what makes a game like Donkey Kong Bananza so refreshing. It's not perfect but it's focused on just delivering a solid, pure, experience the same way games were 20 years ago. Back when you'd go into the e-shops, sort through new releases, and have faith that every game listed was at least a real product someone intended for purchase, or look through a sales list without 95% of it being "The Jumping Food Item."

I'm getting old.