I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.

I don't think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less 'risky' in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It's the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.

I've run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that's the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That's basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.

But like, I think that may be part of what's missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you're making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it's kind of more fun if it's got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player's interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn't much of a story.

Honestly, I think it's just more of the kind of watering down that's inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren't conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn't just affect what decisions are made in a game's development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.

There's definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren't just about the decisions of individual companies.

You even see this with games that were insanely cash grabby from ten or so years ago. Borderlands 2 made you pay for every level cap increase and tiny piece of updated content as it rolled out. The handsome collection fixed that, but it's still true that it really tried to toll you at every corner. Game is still highly regarded though.