Nah, I wouldn't say so.
I would probably say its more due to people buying habits. Nowawdays, the appeal for home consoles have dropped in the last few years. With the booming market for portable electronics with smartphones and tablets its quite eay to see where peoples money are going. And if a casual gamer from last gen can get by with super cheap or freemium games.. its going to be harder to convince people to pay the full $60/£45 for games that may or may not be any good. Not like to $1-3 games from a typical game an iOS/Android marketplace - lacking it may be which are like throwaways.
So you'll have consumers less inclined to buy something completely different than to something they are more familar with. Leaving not much in between. Thus, you have publishers wanting to the safe side and not go for risky moves in publishing unknown IP's; with big variance to what's popular, so they end up putting most of their eggs in one basket (or in this case the games - or franchises they know they can sell).
And the reason why Murdered: Soul Suspect sold horribly is because the game looked like crap. No amount of marketing could ever make that game look decent - be it a A, AA or AAA budget game.
Edit: Adding to that. A new game released at lower than than the usual price is usually seen as being crap. It doesn't instill consumers confidence in a game when its discounted from the publisher from the get-go. There are a some titles released this year that I can think of (at the top of my head), that fall into that category; Thief and Murdered: SS.
