like oh wow ur game about exploring an untouched world where the punchline of every "joke" is that you're being exploited by an unfeeling corporation? man that's so unique that nobody who read that sentence realized I was talking about Journey To The Savage Planet because there's so fucking many of them
You know what I want? Universal jail time for all gamers
But if I'm not gonna get that, I want games that take place in a world we'd want to live in where the objective is to help it remain as such.
If someone pitched to me a GTA game set in a horrible word not worth living in the way they all are, I wouldn't care what city it's set in. It's been done. If someone said, "hey we're gonna make a GTA game except it's set in a nearly post-capitalism world and your objective is to try to protect your city from incursion by the forces of reaction" I'd buy that shit up so fast.
TLDR; why doesn't an inherently reactionary industry just pander to me? :/
I was born in 1974. And I said there was no significant industry. Games were already being made, but you greatly overestimate how big the 'gaming industry' was back then. The biggest publisher during the 1970s, Atari, was literally 80 people in a small office. Nintendo had only 4 games in its catalog by 1980 (arcade titles, the NES wasn't a thing yet). The Commodore 64, by far the most popular home computer, had a grand total of 36 commercial releases that year, and, well, just look.