He's right. Consider this: Zelda comes from Shiggy's cave exploring. Pokemon comes from Satoshi Tajiri's insect collecting. Prince of Persia comes from Jordan Mechner's love of 1930s adventure movies and Middle-Eastern literature. People bring experiences from the world, and make original games on top of that. What about "gamers"? Sure, it's cool to love games, but you have to bring something else to the table. People who don't have experiences outside of that little bubble can't really add anything. They just distill what has been done before, making games ever more self-centered and unoriginal.

You can notice the same in music. For example, old rock musicians knew blues, jazz, gospel, country, swing, folk and much more. They had various influences, they took little bits from all of that, and the result was original and exciting. But now we have tons of rock musicians who grew up with rock, and that's all. Since they don't know anything outside of rock, they can't add anything to rock.