Mhm. Now we mostly see this human behavior:
Back then people had less of a reason to have money because they didn't have much to buy + having a job was enough. I really making it simple to make a point here so I exclude country and economical crisis situations here. But now there are lots to buy and then economy is really bad. Society kinda reverted to the times that gotta make lots of baby just to send the kids to work to have a decent life. That's why people started to sell anything.
In early days of internet there was "community service" logic. People developed programs, fixed games with unofficial patches and all, but now they all ask money so they can afford keep paying for Only Fans girls or some gacha games. Need money to keep buying iPhones are you will be socially shamed and whatnot new generation life style that's more leaned into making people always in need of wasting money but I won't say "capitalism bad" because my point is different. So this is the reality of the situation so virtually having just one job is not enough due to unstable reality of jobs. You gotta keep saving money for in case you are fired all the time. And to be fired you don't have to make mistake. You are just an asset so when they think you need to go they send you.
So my point: Back then people either developed their passion games or professionals were in the industry to realize their dreams. Now whole industry turned into "this guy works here because he is kid of my aunt" and "this guy couldn't find a job as a programmer but despite he never play games we better hire him because his lack of experience ensure us to pay him the minimum wage we can" and then some random shareholder who know nothing about video games comes and vote for making The Outer Worlds less RPG but more FPS BS. And then indie industry turned into copy-paste games to make money and therefore they lean more on porn for easy money but ironically they don't sell much so they just GTFO out of Steam lol. Back then developers had a real job but from side they would develop a passion game and release it, now it's more like everyone copy each other, like some Only Fans girl just to sell. Back then people thought they needed to make a difference to be known and sell, not they all follow the same way like a sheep and expect to sell. It doesn't even work for the porn industry lol.
Another thing is easy to access easy to use video game engines ruined the industry because they either spam porn games or generic horror games when it's not direct copy-paste of some other popular game. Relatively it causes this issue: Steam is populated by so many rubbish, good games are burried millions of rubbish down and turn into hidden gems. The game doesn't sell due to lack of advertizement and then gets lost into oblivion, the developer gets discouraged and never ever develop a game again while Hideo Kojima BS spam BS games and he is turned into some god lol.
In the end why a game sells anymore mostly about it's popular and that's it. Back then we bought games due to nothing else to play and then we really made really good games popular intentionally so video game industry learn what we pay for so they can improve the industry. Now nothing we did had any affect, we bought games to give courage for these companies to make them understand what we want but they are still blind to our signals, so as indie industry. There are already tons of proven games that's liked but no one wanna develop a better game to make profit, instead they copy-paste 1% and expect they would swim in money. Even AAA video game companies does it and then they cry why they couldn't sell 2 millions and then boom 200+ people are fired due to bad management and BS shareholders, not because it's the fault of these people. The whole industry is like a headless chicken spam random games and expect it to sell. At least until PS2-era they tested the water and released different games to see if it would sell or not. Now they spam generic of the generic and expect to sell lol.