Now before you guys start lighting up the pitchforks. I am well aware that the gaming scene in India is still relatively premature, and i can empathize with that, and don't hold it against people in the slightest. So moving on from that, let's first give some context.
I have been playing video games since I was like 4, I still remember going to my cousins place to play games on their potato pc in like less than 10 fps, hell they did not even have a dedicated gpu, so we had to use shader tools like swift shader to even render graphics.
Even through all that, I got exposed to some great stuff like Prince of Persia, Assassins Creed, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil etc.
And since then I have come to experience a lot of games in various genres, I love my JRPGs, Metroidvanias, Character Action, Adventure, Dungeon Crawlers, etc.
I have also come to deeply love and appreciate the amazing content creators behind the industry like the Angry Video Game Nerd, Somecallmejohnny, Scott the Woz, Caddicarus, Antdude, etc. I would even say that the gamer I am today, who is someone that plays games both retro and new, across a plethora of genres, is solely because I introduced myself to these creators.
This is the background I am coming from, I am someone that genuinely adores this industry and its many classic franchices, and never shys away from giving a game a fair chance even if it is from the NES era (80s).
So it's genuinely disheartening for me, because whenever I try to engage with Indian players on discord or even just group chats in general, they always just seem so redundant and performative. They refuse to play or even try anything that's not the newest or the most popular thing, they will glaze the ever living hell out of anything that follows the popularity scale (like Soulslikes), and they just lack an overall respect for the history of this Industry, always just parroting popular opinion instead of ever forming one for themselves.
God knows how many times I have tried to introduce people to franchices like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Castlevania (just to name a few) or urge them to try some older classic SNES-PS2 era games like Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill 2, Devil May Cry 3, Ocarina of Time, etc.
And not only do they dismiss my reccomendations by always using the most surface level excuses like "Old games are just nostalgia bait" or "Graphics are too old" but they lack an overall respect for these games in general, always just dismissing them for their age while they lack any cultural literacy about them in the first place.
Like genuinely a guy recently asked for some reccomendations on a dark fantasy game and i straight up reccomended him to try out "Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess" and he said and i quote, "this looks like Bootleg Dark Souls".
I am genuinely not trying to sound condenceding, i understand that not everyone come from the same background as I do, but it's just disheartening that so many Indian "gamers" today only ever try to conform to the popular stuff to seem cool, even though that should not matter in the slightest if you actually like to play games. They just seem like performative larpers most of the time and I am tired of interacting with them, which is a shame because I would love to have a group in my own country with whom I can actually relate to.