I came across this article which I thought you guys would find interesting.
I don't agree with everything he says (particularly the episodic content), but it's a good read.

Nice find...
There are some good statistics there and some particularly interesting points.

wtf? at one point he is talking about how gamers no longer have time to spend in a game, and then he uses WORLD OF WARCRAFT as an example of a game that people DON'T devote a lot of time to.

Some interesting comments in the article i think the use of download services is spot on the most games i have bought this year has been from Gog (of course),Steam and direct 2 drive and i cant remember the last time i was in a dedicated games shop.

I buy pretty much all my games from Amazon, eBay, Half.com or GOG. GOG is about the only digital distribution service that allows you to backup your games to hard media without an activation requirement.
I was in a GameStop not too long ago and found Unreal Anthology for $2. I grabbed both copies. ;)

While I don't agree with everything he says, I agree that the industry hasn't followed its audience. Games are no longer only for teenagers, because people who played games when they were teenagers still play games as they get older.
I, as an adult gamer (I'm 31), find woefully little of interest to me in the current games market. Everyone seems to try for the biggest hit, and in doing so, goes for the lowest common denominator. While that can be entertaining, it cannot hold my interest for long.
Maturity, depth, intelligent humor, gripping stories, engaging characters. These are all things I connect with games of old, and not at all with modern games. Fallout, Sacrifice, Sanitarium, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, StarCraft. These are games I look back on with equal parts fondness for the magnificent games that they are, and sadness that it seems I shall never see their like again.
And we all know what the games industry has translated "mature" into these days: buckets'o'blood and perhaps a few scantily clad women (because sex is obviously much more dangerous than violence). Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not speaking out against sex and violence in video games. Hell, I love sex and violence in video games, even though I'd prefer a better balance between the two. The problem is, that that is all it has come to mean. So mostly all so-called "mature" video games these days are gore-fests, with a little innuendo thrown in for good measure, and not much else.
I want really mature games. Games that I, as an adult, can appreciate, because they are deeper than "shoot/stab/kick anything that moves". Games like Sanitarium, which is deeply philosophical and feeds your brain, not just by taxing it with puzzles, but also by actually providing food for thought, something almost totally lacking in modern games.
The last game I had hoped would provide this, was Spore. All the hype which had gone before the games release (up to 4 years before) presented it as quite simply the game of my dreams. A complex simulation of life, evolution and cultural and technological advancement. Imagine my chagrin when, as the release date approached, more and more information indicated that they had pretty much changed the game to appeal to a completely different demographic than they had started out with. I still bought the game, hoping against hope, but was sorely disappointed. Instead of the "science-geek's-wet-dream" of a game I had been led to believe from the beginning that it would be, what I actually ended up with was a shallow, simplistic "make-friends-by-dancing-and-playing-music" game which repeated itself ad nauseam every 5 minutes. And the worst part is that from a technical standpoint, the game was impressive as hell. The procedurally generated content worked like a dream, the editors were easy to use, albeit artificially restricted a bit too much, the universe was every bit as vast as had been promised... And there was absolutely nothing interesting to do there.
The last new game I truly enjoyed was Portal. So much intelligent thought went into that game, with the purpose of making it enjoyable for the player on more than one level.
I've suddenly run out of things to say at the moment. I guess it had to happen sooner or later.

I'd like to add something equally as deep, but instead I'll just say, "Great post". ;)

I feel that we are in a wierd state at the moment, from the perspective of a slightly older gamer.
I saw the the era of the 90s as gamings "golden age", and while that could in part be put down to nostalgia, I think all that is required is to look at the wishlist top ten to help prove my point.
It was in this period that games got more graphically detailed, but also more complex in nature. The pioneer spirit that lead gaming in the 80s had created great ideas, but the technology had increased in the 90s to allow that to be fully realised.
Since 2000, it seems to me (again with my blinkered view) that the technological advancement has brought nothing but graphical improvement (with perhaps a few notable exceptions).
I feel like we were promised better AI, better animation and the like. I'm still waiting.

a lot of this is the same stupid drama we keep hearing about video games and how they're declining blah blah blah... it's always so overblown and i'm getting kind of tired of these editorials
plus, how self-important do you have to be to title the article "an open letter to the video game industry?" that implies that this guy is so important that an entire industry should listen to him
that said, he makes a few valid points (mostly about the industry identifying it's audience), but i would like to see some of his sources, and a few less exaggerated arguments (he extends his statistics on blockbuster AAA titles to all games in his argument)

The reason video game companies don't work with gamers is because... it's a company! Their main objective is to make money, not make people happy. They come up with an idea, think about it, get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tank it for a while, come up with a catchy slogan like: "It's got balls... of steel!" or something stupid like that, and then put it through the production process as cheaply as possible so that everyone at the top of the totem gets the money they so horribly do not deserve.
Most ideas for games, movies, music, whatever... aren't made by people who actually play games, watch movies, or care about music. They're marketing campaigns now. It's got nothing to do with a quality product anymore, it's all about something being just a product, that's easily seen or heard by people all over the world, in the hopes someone will pick it up and buy it.
I'm 25, I work 40 hours a week, I have lots of bills. You know what I do when I want to play a game? I buy an old one, that I played as a teen, and I pop it in the PC, or PS1, and I play it for a few hours. Then I go to sleep. The thing is, is that the games I play, are long, complex, and have solid characters and story lines. It takes me months to play just one.
I think the real problem, is that these companies are coming up with some exceptional ideas, but are putting too much time, effort, and money into a game that you can play through in a grand total of 6 hours. Their not lasting.
I think the main problems in this area of entertainment, is that everybody is so obsessed with "pushing the envelope" graphics wise, or physics wise, or whatever... that they put so much time, and so much effort, and so much money into the wrong things, for the wrong reasons.
It's not about the playability anymore, it's about the "Awe" factor. And the "Look at that!". But that only last a blink. Before you know it, little Timmy or Billy or whatever is chucking the game at the local EB for five cents, or just giving it to their friends because they don't want it anymore.
I don't know, it's kind of scattered, people. But I think you know where I'm coming from.

Well said. That would also explain why I have such a fascination with older games. :)

I perhaps have a view unlike many of you others here in that I began as a console gamer. I have Nintendo and Sega in my blood. Before a year ago, I had six PC games... The Sims, SimCity, SimCity 2000, Sonic R, Quake 3 Arena, and Civilization III. In the past year, I now have 39 PC games. To me, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are becoming too PC-like, much like the Original Xbox was to me. On the flipside, thanks to digital distribution platforms like Steam and GoG.com and the fact that even a game like Street Fighter IV is coming to it, PC Gaming is becoming more like console gaming to me. However, PC Gaming is in general cheaper than console gaming with the Xbox 360 and PS3 BECAUSE of the Weekend Deals that digital distributors have every week. Heck, about the only games that really interest me on the HD Twins besides Soul Calibur IV and Final Fantasy XIII are specifically XBLA games.
Now, I have yet to mention Nintendo and their Wii here, but I'm a big fan of Nintendo and part of the selling point to me for the Wii was the Virtual Console. Many of those classic console games are ALSO new to me and are also vastly cheaper than the big disk releases. I'm all for more classics being sold cheaply via digital distribution!

Making people happy will make you money. :P

We need smarter games! I am so tired of seeing games made for the "challenged" set. By "smarter" I don't mean a puzzler but something that stimulates the brain every now and then with some hidden nuance, a plot that grips you by the short and curlies and doesn't rely on slurs and gratuitous sex and violence.

What's this talk about the "old gamers" ?? Heck, I'm 21 (not old) and I can't think of many good games that came out after 2000. Maybe Fallout 3, Mass effect, Bioshock, HL2 and Portal but other than that mot recent games are crap.
To me, the golden age of gaming were the final years of the 90's, from 1997 to 1999.
Every single one of my favourite games came out in those 3 years: HL, Starcraft & brood war, Fallout 1 & 2, Unreal Tournament, Thief 1 & 2, Resident evil 1 to 3,etc etc..
After that period, most games are essencially a graphics fest, with very few true "content" and It saddens me that the 1st comment most people my age make about a game is about the graphics.
Hell, there isn't a single year that I don't kick start some good old emulators to play Beyond Oasis and Guardian heroes.