Hot take: Games being "dumbed down" by reducing the complexity/depth of the experience to appeal to a broader audience is an actual problem in the medium.
Not *all* streamlining (and there sure are things that are overcomplicated) is bad, but quite a chunk of it is just detrimental for the people that would enjoy a less "simple" experience. In the service of people who may or may not enjoy the new game anyway.
@flesh I feel like there's kind of an important distinction between "reducing depth" and "streamlining" too, though.
I find that a lot of the accessibility of the game isn't in how many gameplay systems or how much complexity there is, but rather in how those systems are introduced and explained.
You can have a highly complex game that takes care to teach you one system at a time, as a part of normal gameplay, with plenty of time - or you can have a typical asset-flip simulator game with almost zero depth that nevertheless takes two hours of frustration to figure out how to buy a thing somewhere.
I wonder if the underlying problem here really is that a lot of game developers just don't really understand how to make things accessible (which is more didactic than technical), and so they use "complexity reduction" as a poor stand-in because that's what they know.
@joepie91 Yeah, you *can* make a game more approachable and accessible without taking away important parts of its depth. I'd say that's the goal.
While some developer issues are certainly a contributing factor, but also, like, management and marketing are probably a major source of the push for "wider appeal" (distinct from accessibility).