Point is that if a video game sheds the fancy presentation and is stripped down to its core gameplay mechanics and presented in its most basic form it should still be a game that can be played, otherwise it's not much of a game. Take Virtua Tennis or similar games as an example, you have buttons to lounge, sprint and such, at its most extreme you could more or less play the same game as a fancy pong clone from the classic pong perspective. It would still be really fun.
for clarification (after reading my post again), the twat comment wasn't aimed at anyone in this thread, but the high on their own fart redditor/journo whose first (and only) console was a 360.
my problem is when you reduce a game to a single aspect, it's very easy to crawl up your own ass. super mario's "gameplay loop" (another term tards love to abuse) is running in one direction and pressing a to jump. you can even go as far and claim all videogames are inherently shit because all you do is press buttons to generate bing bing wahoo noises. it doesn't say anything about the game itself, of which gameplay is only part of, and depending on the game doesn't even have to be that important in the grand scheme of things.
the other thing is while you can reduce quake to 320p mipmap 0 for max frames, that's only for a fraction of the people that play it (since it's mainly for competitive play, and most people don't play on that level or even want to). most games are a product meant to be sold, you could never sell quake as a brown pixel mess to people that want and expect more than that. it's great that the game gives you the option, but that's more a feature which in the end gives you more customers. same as fightans; character design, background, etc all play into it, street fighter would have never become a cultural icon if it would just have been stick figures fighting hitboxes.
there's also the question how much you can "improve" on "pure" gameplay. if you take the tennis example that's just "pong with a twist", so whatever you do you'll inevitably get farthuffers who claim it's "derivative" or if you don't improve enough "generic". inevitably you have to consider other aspects else you don't got anywhere.
Valve style story telling destroyed games having stories IMO.
shit devs that think it's the apex of vidya storytelling did, HL1 making loads of dosh didn't dissuade tards either to go "oh, it's popular, it must be good". so all you can accuse valve of is being successful with trying something new (more like refining what already existed).
you also conveniently ignored that it was the same studio everybody was getting wet panties over their "visual storytelling" in left 4 dead that worked without long-ass cutscenes or exposition dumps.
I blame Epic and a few gatekeepers for turning the indie market into one big, stagnant cool kids tree house where ideas are recycled and everyone gets a free handjob with minimal effort.
The console and AAA market is different, from my perspective it would seem like development companies have adopted risk based practices, as such it's no longer enough for them to work on high risk projects that may turn a profit but rather focus on low risk projects that will definetely generate said profit,. In effect what this means is that you won't be seeing 3D platformers or spectacle fighters but you will surely see Fifa, with royalties, publishers and competing marketing budgets gatekeeping any small or medium sized development firm that may pose a threat to the market.
big companies were always risk averse, because shareholders don't like it when they gamble with multi-million dollar projects.
epic is a non-factor, unless your game becomes "big" enough on it's own that they want to pay you for guaranteed sales and boost their store. anything else is just the market following what's currently popular with a healthy dose of sturgeon's law, like it always does.
of course for a market to function there needs to be enough demand, no one produces at a loss for long, but there still gets stuff made for a niche, sometimes out of pure enthusiasm (it will probably look like crap because good assets aren't cheap and you need to know what you're doing, but still). last steam game festival had a few 3d platformers for example. tasomachi felt quite a bit jank but I still remember it for some reason, think it's done by a single dev, which might explain the rough edges. onirike is the another game that looks interesting, but haven't gotten around to try yet.
the biggest issue isn't some intentional gatekeeping, just market forces at play and oversaturation, with especially the latter making it difficult for people to even know about your game. could be the best game ever, doesn't matter if no one notices and tells others about it. same reason marketing works so well with selling shit to consoomers, because that's all they know and they are too lazy/dumb to look what else is out there. seriously, most of what valve is trying to do is give people ways to learn about new games, but that's not exactly easy (there's still room for improvement because valve is valve, but that's far more than other stores are doing).
if you want an example, in this very thread we got someone who can't even figure out how to configure his own store, looks at new releases instead of following (the right) curators or simply checks youtube compilations from people that already did the filtering for him (which means it doesn't matter how much crap there is if you never see it, and in turn now one buys).
in the end a tool is only as good as the person who uses it.
