Culture shift towards gaming and time management. A lot of "quick" games are flooding the market as our attention spans are bombarded with strains on our time.
How many of us own games which we have played very little, purely because we love the idea of spending all day playing them, but don't have the time to do it. FTL on the iPad is a godsend for me at the moment, travelling with work so much.
But in general I just don't have the time to invest in all the new titles and also as I have aged, my gaming preferences have changed.
As ffor the games were better back in the good old days as Sunset alluded too, well yes and no. We all remember fondly the great old titles... but there was a lot of tat as well and a lot of games that whilst they didn't need patching to play, were bug ridden.
And a lot of the modern game issues for me are due to Publishers demands. The production and release cycles of games very much mirror software implementation projects I have been on. You have budgets and dates you are expected to hit and you fix the issues later. What happens of course is that the teams are ramped down post release and fixes take longer as a result. That is the nature of the beast and exacerbated when you have a publisher interested in profit maximisation and moving on to the next big thing. This in turn is driven by customer demand, so our own impatience is just as much to blame.
Just look at the ranting here sometimes for faster progress, yet at the same time we want a product that is flawless. Customer expectations are often unrealistic.
The internet has also brought out the best and the worst in gamers. The rush for Everyone Online all the time and all being the hero like we were when offline has spawned a plethora of dull repetitive MMO's, yet we lap them up because, well I don't really know.
If I want to hang around one place doing the same thing all day, i.e. grinding, I can just stick to my day job, at least I get paid for that.
As a result, how do I expect to play this game? Yeah Online All, maybe IronMan, but at times purely in a Co_op mode with friends, because for me the best gaming experience remains when i am playing with my friends. The social interaction with people I like, banter, shared memories.