Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.
It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.
Any platform that restricts how and what I can run in it has inherently less value to me. This is why I mostrly avoided consoles all my life.
The only console I bought was the original Wii. The games were extremely expensive, and they disabled all the services that made the console useful after a few years (weather channel, news channel, store).
Fortunately I added a few SNES, PCEngine, Genesis/Megadrive and Gamecube emulators otherwise I would now have a very pretty white doorstop.
I like shooters, so I got the full bundle and I tried hard to like it.
None of the games gave me a lasting impression. The plot didn’t stick with me, the enemies were weird, the guns felt weak and flimsy, the rooms kept repeating in some sections and it got very boring. There were some fun bits with the vehicles, etc., but overall the experience was… pretty much average.
I was expecting something like the Half-Life series, but this wasn’t it.
Now that you put it like that, I think what puts me off is all the melee and glory kills. Not my cup of tea. I need my social distancing from hellspawn. That, and the puny amounts of ammo. When I play a boomer shooter, I want to shoot. If I wanted melee, I’d play Mortal Kombat or something.