Put the 4 decades below into the correct order for you.
Best decade goes top of the list, worst decade goes bottom of the list.
Show the decades you thought the best games were released and that gave you the most gaming pleasure.
If you aren't old enough to have experienced all decades, don't include the decade(s) you did not experience.
You can include/take into account all gaming platforms. (PC's, consoles and handhelds)

My list is as follows:

2000-2009
1990-1999
1980-1989
2010-2019

From the list above you can see I thought things just got better and better from 1980 to 2009.
From 2010 it all changed. Gaming has gone backwards imo from game quality to the way we now purchase games.

I'm very happy to have a place like GOG over places like Steam. I'd be even happier if I could just order a game and GOG sent me out (in the mail) my game in a nice game box containing a big fat physical game manual with USB holding the game installer itself.

Shame physical boxes and physical manuals are a thing of the past. Even digital manuals are virtually a thing of the past now. Modern gaming sucks! lol

I like the arcade times, I remember some places had included contra and other games and it did not cost any coins to play. It was the greatest moment, since you could play as long as you would want. However, the ones with coins where you raced or played the aim shooting games, solo or co-op, those were the best!!!

It will always be the arcade years of 1990 to 1999. My then gf and I had a couple of kids and we started to attend tournaments together. Some of our best beginning moments.

Whatever the current one is because I can play whatever is fancy and new and most everything I'd want to from the past 3 decades. ;)

Nineties. Nothing beats the joy that Baldur's Gate, the first three Kombats, Primal Rage, Rampage World Tour, Fallout 2, the Dark Savant Trilogy, and DOOM gave me as a young'un of 8 or 9 years old.

I like the focus on game design rather than graphics, the challenge and the aesthetic of blocky graphics of 2000-2009.

i was actually amazed to discover that even in the Netherlands you can still order boxed versions for a lot of games, through bol.com for example, even modern ones! and some developers, such as slitherine have the physical option still available for almost all of their games when you place an order via their own store doubleudoubleudoubleudotslitherinedotcom

'90-'99, hands down.
If I could I'd say 15 years, '90-2004; that was imo the time period when creativity and technology went hand in hand, while by 2005 the latter far surpassed the former, now stagnating almost everywhere.
Most of the "good stuff" today is a rehash of something made between 1990 and 2005, in my opinion.

2010-now is surely the worst, gaming became a money machine for disgusting corporations and nothing else, the triumph of acrytical conumerism.

Late 2000s to now allowed hundreds if amazing niche games to be released on the market.

We have ea and Activision making millions but we have also hundreds of amazing and unique games not from corporations

So you are being a bit unjust to them.

1. 2010-Now: Dark Souls, NieR: Automata, Yakuza Like a Dragon, Forza Horizon games, Flight Simulator plus countless cheap indies. Gaming has never been cheaper.

2. 90's: Everything from SSI and SirTech. Fallout. Jagged Alliance the greatest video game ever. PC gaming's golden age when it was still the wild west, before political correct idiots invaded.

3. 70's: Yes I go back that far. Playing Space Invaders on the original coffee table machine. Atari 2600 and pong with school friends.

4: 80's: C64 and Elite. Amiga. NES.

5: 2000-2009: Early on it was good, but there must have been some reason why I lost interest in gaming during that time. Oh yeah I remember, Steam.

Of course it's this one! Why? It was a long road from CGA/EGA to 256 colors palette and SVGA resolution, and then to 32bit color palette, 3D acceleration and high resolutions, from floppy to CD/DVD. Each year there was a new game category invented, so many classic hits, best point & click adventures, FPS and RPGs were created. My god I'm still completing some of them old games from the 90s and they still rock. It was the time when games were games, not just business for so called *casual players*. There is a few games from recent time which I really like, but something is not right, it's like game designers keep designing games for super little kids, I would prefer some serious games for players without a brain damage (I'm not talking about adult games with nudity and sex mind you). Ah, but I don't lose hope to find some decent game.

Off-topic: CP 2077 is NOT a bad game, but I would tweak quite many things in it, especially the interface and interactions with the game world.

1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
1980-1989

The first one was easy though the latter two were a difficult choice. I have many fond memories of 1980's gaming more on the ZX Spectrum than PC. On the other hand, aside from Prey (2017), I've virtually lost all interest in newer post 2015 AAA games. And very definitely lost all excitement for the future of AAA gaming that I had back in the 90's when everyone thought the future of gaming +20 years would be an avalanche of new IP, super clever AI, astounding audio physics, better graphics, Daggerfall sized levels, every game moddable, etc.

20 years on aside from more sparkly graphics we seem to have instead ended up with a complete industry creativity brain drain that lead to endless recycling of the same 90's to mid 2000's IP we were playing 20-25 years ago, the same "least minimum effort" AI & audio physics, worse DRM, store-front tribalism (inc formerly open modding being locked being platform paywalls), intelligence insulting "surprise mechanics" monetization, and a general change in the 'feel' of the big money games from having all developer passion replaced with 'cash cow' / 'tickbox development' mentality). For me it's only really the high quality Indie's that stop the 2010 decade from being placed last due to the "Bullshit factor".

^ Exactly the same list for me for same reasons. The 90's was overwhelming trying to keep up with new fresh creative titles. Just when you were still halfway working through the popular Doom mods and trying to finish Lemmings & Eye of the Beholder, along came Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Unreal, Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Half Life, Age of Empires, LucasArts vs Sierra, Commandos, etc, all came out so thick and fast at the same time it was impossible to keep up with (in a good way). None of this stuff were sequels of 80's stuff and it triggered off a huge wave of excitement to experience nothing but pure unrefined creativity even from "big money" (for the time) studios.

Fast forward 25 years and it's either an over-focus on multi-player (especially Battle Royale clones) rife with cheaters / junk monetization, or it's just mindless over-sequels of the same worn old IP that's long grown stale. I liked many 80's movies like Lethal Weapon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, yet I wouldn't want Lethal Weapon 14, or Indiana Jones 28 the same way some AAA IP have long outstayed their welcome. I think I've bought a total of 8 AAA games for the whole of the 2010's (fewer AAA games for the whole decade vs what I was buying per year by the late 90's). The rest of the 2010 decade was propped up entirely by Indie studios. So whilst "tastes change" subjectively as you get older, the AAA industry has also more objectively changed too especially since around 2014-2015, and definitely not for the better in many areas.

I would propose that Kojima's Death Stranding quietly does everything Cyberpunk promised and then some.

You are right.
I didn't mean to diminish the work of non-corporate businesses, far from it!
Still, I keep thinking that has been (and still is, actually) the worst period because of corporate bs, despite the greatness of inides and lower budget names like Focus.