2004 was the year the golden age ended. It was only downhill from there. Still had some decent stuff (Half Life 2 was a cool tech demo for physics, and VtM: Bloodlines is a classic), but that would change in the years after.
After Bloodlines and Half Life 2, what big profile PC exclusives do you remember? It was all multiplatform with console first in mind from 2005 onward. And especially from 2006 onward, when the XBox 360 came out. Everything got consolized and PC-centric genres died out almost completely. Here on the Codex we painfully remember how RPGs were an almost dead genre - except Bioware and Obsidian delivering extremely mediocre titles (that often were designed with consoles in mind, see Jade Empire), no large company was making them at all, and indies were few and had barely any budget (Jeff Vogel's games, the Eschalon trilogy). It was only in the mid-2010s, particularly after Steam opened itself up to any and all developers with no curation, that indies got the chance to properly resurrect classic genres.
RTS games, for example, still existed for a while into the mid-00s but by 2010 they were pretty much a dead genre, nobody was making them anymore at all, with a handful of exceptions (like Firefly remaking the exact same Stronghold game but worse every couple of years). FPS games became thoroughly consolized, and features that late 90s and early 00s FPS games introduced, like leaning with Q and E, were scrapped due to not being practical with controllers. Instead, sticky cover became super popular and everything turned into popamole.
Games may not have been woke 20 years ago, but they started to become shit. And we're still suffering the long term consequences of the design principles introduced in that time of consolization and casualization.
