Why, something something Capitalism something something but it was always this way something something conceptual misunderstanding
So in early game development for games like the Ultima series or other early games, the corporate side of the company was usually also the creator of the game itself.
I haven't researched the video game crash of 1983 in depth, but I've heard about it plenty. Common thread being they saturated the market with slop when little demand for the slop existed. Nintendo then overcame that by marketing the NES as a family console.
Coming off the heels of that, and also just due to the nature of the work at the time, there wasn't as big of a split between corporate and creators. And they had aligned values in both wanting the games to be good and for the games to appeal in specific ways to specific people.
Flashback to Ultima, right, and Richard Garriott started that in 1981. His series was on Apple II primarily, and it appealed to a certain type of PC gamer. It had his vision though, and he put things into it like the "Possessed Children" room. It made him wealthy enough to build his own eccentric fantasy themed mansion.
And his company ran into monetary issues often enough, but their only solution was to build a better game and expand how they did things.
You look at his company and other gaming companies, and there's this trend from the 80s into the 90s into the early 2000s where the success burgeons and blooms. Making the billion dollar industry that gaming is today. At some point, either the companies die out or become so large that corporate becomes separate from the creators. In some cases, the creators don't even get a seat in the board room.
His particular company was bought by EA in 1992 for $35 million. It then expanded and made an MMO. Its last major title around 1999/2000 and beyond that was maintenance mode for Ultima Online. EA killed it in 2004, a corporate decision.
So back to why 2001. Well that was a deliberate dig by me at the Square Enix merger. Square's corporate branch was notoriously bad with finances, and they were discussing merging with Enix even before Spirits Within bombed at the box office. In fact, Enix almost pulled out of the merger because of how bad that movie bombed, when previously they'd bribed for the merger because it would be easier to merge still than to just buy Square outright. Either way and particulars aside, after the merger the way staff and creatives both were treated/reacted was to either be moved, removed, or quit. The merge actually happened officially in 2003 but had been on the table since 2000. Spirits Within bombed in 2001. With no capital to negotiate with, Square had to lay all of their IPs on the table and give control of them over to Enix as well as the direction for the company. Really less a merger and more a Enix putting its fist up a Square puppet's ***.
The same year that Spirits Within bombed, in November, in fact, 23 years ago on this Friday, the Xbox was released by Microsoft. They made the Xbox as a business decision because consoles had become so popular that they believed consoles might overtake PCs as a primary entertainment device threatening their main item of sale. The first efforts and games going on Xbox were given a high amount of care and they brought on teams like Bungie for its launch with its flagship title, Halo. These great games lead to lots of smear campaigns against eastern gaming companies, with each year after, Microsoft grew more and more complacent about it.
By the time the Xbox 360 came out in November 2005 they had made Xbox influential around the world, and so they were able to sell the 360 in more countries than any other console at the time. Though I don't think it had the highest sales numbers total, it was still quite influential. Among its influence was Xbox Live which pushed and swindled for always online to be the next big thing by diverting more and more games to require Xbox Live Gold.
Seeing that Xbox could get away with this, the other console companies started to also turn away from free online service, though that would take a few more years.
And the bestsellers on the 360 were First Person Shooters which really hammered in microtransactions and literally the same game with a different name and campaign over and over again in quick succession, back to back, with little to no innovation.
You could argue that Microsoft actually used the success of Xbox to sabotage the console market with slop, turning players back towards PC and PC oriented gaming, something that may have happened naturally but taken twice as long otherwise.
And they were doing this on a worldwide scale by 2006.
But a consequence of that influence and that direction was they also lowered the bar for who could and would be working on games. They lowered the bar for what constituted a "good" game.
Marketing efforts go towards a wider audience. Games for everyone! With the next Xbox literally pushing for always online, which got pushback at the time, but they ultimately succeeded in pushing it onto consumers. And they did that, because they wanted to get more money, pushing to get rid of split screen shared gaming requiring each player to have their own Xbox if they wanted to play together. Not a universal even now, but so prevalent it might as well be. So prevalent, in fact, that a good portion of the youth hate splitscreen games because they're used to having the whole screen to themselves.
All corporate policy that didn't have quality gaming in mind, just profits.
It was never an all at once thing, and sure there's always been corporate interest in games that have made some game series more successful than others, but overtime and overall Suits in a board room with no connection to creation have been bad for gaming.