There were lots of games back then. And many of them were as bad or worse than the shittiest shovelware and template swaps we’ve got today.
Thing is, most people don’t remember the 200 Action Games 3 disc pack at the bottom of the bargain bin cause they sucked.
I’m not disputing that there is more “stuff” these days by raw numbers, with the barrier to creation and distribution of games and such dramatically lowered by ubiquitous and easy to use tooling. But I bet the ratios of good games to shitty games won’t have changed too terribly much over the years.
I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.
Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.
Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.