One interesting question is the degree to which the game industry became a business and not an art. Really clever, long-lasting gameplay is generally a thing of the past.
These days it's all flashy graphics to catch your eye but the underlying game is shallow/boring. As someone said, it's a bit like music. I think music videos are one of the worst things to happen to music, as they all end up looking like some soft-porn with hyperative elevator music behind them.
Once you needed clever, entertaining gameplay to keep you interested, as the graphics were really fairly basic. Similarly, companies needed to get their games right on release as they couldn't be patched via internet. In short, they were an evolution from board games.
Now they are flashy, pretty emptiness, with poor AI and often shockingly poor quality issues.
When in doubt, blame the marketers. They'll dumb anything down and cheapen it in nearly every sense of the word as they are remunerated wholly by sales, and not long-term customer retention.
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