It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
A lot of that is due to hardware limitations in the past. If you bought a game that had little content and what content there was was primitive graphics, you’d feel ripped off. Making it challenging means you’re going to be spending more time with the game and feel like the money you spent was worth it.
Now they have the capability to build entire worlds in video games and it looks aesthetically pleasing. Because of this it’s possible to make games closer to a movie experience. But a much longer movie where you can choose the character’s path. No need to make it incredibly challenging to increase the number hours needed to finish it.
And FMV games existed back in the 90s, they just weren’t popular because the resolution sucked.
There are still challenging video games being made and kids still play them, that kid that got the kill screen on tetris for example. That took a lot of skill. But kids have the option of playing video games that are more like controllable movies now too, but these games don’t suck unlike the 90s FMV games.