Yeap, but Digg was still pretty early in it’s life and was very much catering for tech nerds.

Reddit is basically the home of all communities these days, its swallowed what used to be individual forums from around the web and put them into a single place.

Building those new communities across multiple lemmy instances also adds to the complexity.

Reddit also didn’t have Reddit to compete with, which certainly makes things harder.

If you really think about those books as a grown up some of the plot holes are big enough to drive a goddam truck through.

As a kid having their first experience of a magical universe though they were goddam incredible

Spoon my wife until she gets too hot and taps my leg so I roll over whilst listening to some trashy young adult fantasy audiobook.

I think expectations have grown astronomically since 2004, budgets have ballooned, graphical fidelity and animation quality has skyrocketed, development team headcounts have gone through the roof and many games just have more systems than they did before.

Games are less frequent because they take a lot longer to make, I read the other day that Halo 2 was apparently churned out in 10 months, these days even games building on other games foundations such as Tears of the Kingdom can take 5 years to come out.

98 was incredible, besides all the ones OP mentioned they missed:

• Metal Gear Solid
• Sonic Adventure
• Resident Evil 2
• Sonic Adventure
• Grim Fandango
• Caesar III
• Unreal

Surely one of the best years, only possibly beaten by 2004:

• Half Life 2
• MGS3
• GTA: San Andreas
• Ninja Gaiden
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• Doom 3
• Killzone
• Fable
• Burnout 3: Takedown
• Lumines
• Far Cry

So many amazing games!

Because job hopping is scary as hell (especially for developers who struggle with imposter syndrome) and job hunting is generally shitty.

What if I don’t like the new place? What if I can’t feed my wife and kids? What if I’m actually terrible at this and my current place is so stupid they haven’t figured that out? What if the economy tanks in the next couple of months and I’m out on my ear with no severance pay?

Better to stay put, accept slightly less money for another year and look at it again when I’ve got the time and energy to cope with it.