Ah, these would be either the "casual gamers," those people who buy a game or system to play maybe once a year, or the "new gamers" who have never known the classic era. Hmm... if anybody finds anything debatable in what I'm about to say, let me know; I'm not entirely sure of it all myself...
Lessee...
I guess the reason for these games (and gamers) goes back to the 8-bit era (it actually has roots in Atari, but I'll skip that for now.) Video game technology was still new, but there were a few visionaries and dedicated programmers who wanted to make use of the new art form and create veritable masterpieces. As time progressed, companies became better at using the technology (that is, more creative on how to do a lot more with the little resources that they had,) and games became great programming accomplishments as technology progressed through the 16-bit era. The two major factions, Nintendo and Sega, had a rivalry that existed in the minds of the fans, and both continued to hone their game-creation skills, which increased the fan base.
And this did not go unnoticed.
Video games had been pushed aside and ignored by large businesses after what had happened to Atari (a plethora of third party games, most of which could be clumped into "shoot things" or "dodge things,") so the ones who still saw a future in the media were free to explore artistically. Sony, however, realized that there was indeed a business here, and so enters the trade.
I don't quite remember the timing on all of this, but this well into the era when 3-D was novel, and any game could manage success through a 3-D motif.
Soo... The playstation comes into existence. Sony has a "3-D ONLY!" rule on american developers for the beginning, and Final Fantasy VII is released, the first game whose commercials showed NOTHING BUT the cutscenes. The idea that Sony had was basically that everyone who would want a video game system will already have one. Now we begin selling to those who DON'T want one. Games sell through eye-candy, sports games, and things like Tony Hawk bring in their respective fans, and we have a generation whose first and favorite game is FF7.
...
The power of the casual gamer is truly overwhelming: enough fools saying that something will fail will eventually have their way, and Sega is forced to fold. Nintendo with the Game Cube is now the sole hope for the hardcore and classic gamers, Sony releases the next casual gamer system, the Playstation 2, raking in any people that they might have missed by including a DVD player. Bill Gates is observing the success of Sony, and decideds that this'd be a perfect opportunity to extend his global domination and make a few more billion dollars. So he joins the industry (an industry is what happens when an art form gets enough attention, and people far from artists notice and join in for one purpose: $$$. This has also happened to movies in the past decade and a half,) with his X-Box, the first system to buy itself into the business, using Microsoft's deep pockets to aquire, at any cost, anything anybody else might want (he even tried to buy Nintendo!)
So I think that's about where we are now. The "Industry" developers want to lasso people as quickly as possible using what they will know: things that are all purdy-like, those who AREN'T fans won't want to go so in-depth as to realize that there's far more to video games than just what they see, and the classic gamers now make up too small a faction for anybody to be able to pay attention to.
*WHEW*
Go Moon!