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In order not to reinvent the wheel, I will quote the words of the editors of old Russian gaming magazine "Igromaniya", Alexander Kuzmenko and Andrey Alexandrov, from the May 2006 issue, which surprisingly accurately capture the essence of our article today.

Alexander Kuzmenko, preface to the issue:

Remember, friends, all those gloomy prophecies that appeared every now and then on the pages of “Igromaniya” over the past couple of years? Well, about the fact that in the future power on earth will be seized by ubercorporations, marketing and PR will become the main tools of game design, and games will come out equally good, boringly interesting and sterile hits? So, congratulations. This very future has arrived and, it seems, this time it is already final.

Andrey Alexandrov, review of TES IV: Oblivion, page 64:

It’s probably no secret that every year in the gaming industry Creators, talented people who sparkle with ideas and have long since rubbed their index fingers until they are a bloody callus, matter less and less when issuing autographs (although these guys work with no less energy what their colleagues were doing five, ten or fifteen years ago).

The world of computer entertainment is ruled by average guys who have absorbed with their mother’s milk the teachings of Kotler, Black and other luminaries of marketing and PR. Because of the neat “dress code” that blends with the walls of any office, you and I practically don’t see these citizens - but they exist. And the more power they have in their hands, the more noticeable the mistakes they make become.

List of game studios and publishers that went bankrupt in the 2000s:

And this list is far from being complete. As we can see, the 2000s claimed the lives of not just dozens of talented studios, but the fathers of the greatest game series and entire genres, who made a decisive contribution to gaming culture. Almost all of these companies were founded in the 80s and 90s - but how many independent, interesting studios were founded in the 2000s, or, God forbid, the 2010s? This cannot be called a coincidence, an exaggeration, or to say that game studios always closed - it was the “zero” years that became the turning point when the gaming industry was finally taken over by corporations, and put an end to small, creative, creatively genius studios.

So it is especially funny for me to see statements, mainly from reddit NPCs, in the likes of "2007 was the golden era for gaming" [1, 2]. A golden era for corporate greed, rather.