I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.

"there's such an endless selection of excellent games"

If you have 0 standards.

Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.

I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.

> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).

That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.

> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.

This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.

Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.

> We are still in a desert.

It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.

> Most movies suck

Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.

Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.

> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content

This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.

I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.

Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.

Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.