It is hard to tell. On one hand, as the graphics technology has gotten better, the story and the grip of the game has become more vivid and longer lasting. On the other hand, terrible voice acting approved by Diva-like developers with a God complex have me yearning for the days when characters such as Samus Aran were silent.
Overall, games have become more mainstream making them easier and more accessible. The major downside to this is new gamers come to expect single player campaigns they can breeze throughout without having to continue 100 plus times as we had with games like Contra and Contra 3: Alien Wars. Making games more accessible has watered down multiplayer competitiveness where guns have no recoil or sway, you are rewarded when you go on killstreaks with abilities to kill even more players, a radar to show other enemy players and on.
As a whole, we have gone from skill-based to score-based in multiplayer. As a consequence, the blurry line between skilled and cheap has become so blurry that even skilled players are accused of hacking, exploiting and on. I am talking about FPS as it is the genre where this trend has become the most apparent. Just compare Unreal Tournament with Modern Warfare 2. Unreal Tournament was an extreme niche game created to highlight just who the best FPS player was. MW 2 is a FPS created to sell more than 10 million, thus the score-based features of killstreaks and whatnot were put in to make it more accessible.
What you can count on is as video gaming becomes more mainstream, games will become more accessible, which those of us who grew up with our earliest memories playing Duck Hunt and Mario Bros. interpret as easier or:
Created for noobs by those who want to sell to noobs.
This you can count on.
