A lot of developers are bitching that players won't "pay full price" anymore, and the answer is actually much simpler than the companies realize. It's because the developers are not actually adding much to the games anymore. At best we get engaging gameplay, sometimes you get a decent story, but almost everything is now just stitching random GPU features together.
The end result is a game that requires little art and is very inconsistent across different hardware specs. So now gamers are flocking to retro games and indie titles.
One game to look at was Ark Survival Evolved to see one of the last great games, we won't discuss why the game fell from grace in too much depth because it was developers being idiots which caused that. The original animal models were good, but not much detail.
The developers did a great job on the gameplay, though the story was lackluster. The game was fun an engaging from the start, the players loved it. Then they started adding details to the animal models and slowly the game started to look as good as it was fun.
They did simple but elegant layering for fur and feathers, which required some art and skill to accomplish but was not restricted to specific hardware and looked the same across different platforms. The result was encouraging to the players enjoying the same game they saw others playing on YouTube.
This drove engagement and people would pressure their friends to buy the game driving sales. The developers continued to add details to the graphics, while still keeping it from being hardware specific. Soon the worlds felt alive, almost real to the fans.
Everyone was happy.
Then greed and laziness hit and the developers made a sequel. But this time they used hardware specific "features" instead of good artists. The consistency collapsed, the latency jacked up, and the framerates tanked.
The game did not appear consistent across platforms, so what you saw on YouTube wasn't what you saw on your screen. This caused a lot of the fans of the original to stop playing.
Sometimes they update and the players jump on to see, hoping that the developers stopped the insanity. Every time the players became disappointed, there was nothing fixing the issues so the player base quickly fell again.
The YouTubers all stopped playing Ark altogether, live streamers who kept playing it lost viewers. The franchise is essentially dead with some necro posting and empty dreams. The moral here should be obvious, yet somehow I feel the modern developers will still miss it, so here is is said plainly:
Stop using stupid hardware "features" to fill in details and go back to making art.
Gamers don't want to pay for something we already paid for. We already paid for the hardware, we don't want to pay for it's features with every game we buy, so of course we're not going to pay full price for games now.
Make games with actual content and then we'll pay full price for them.
