The money incentives have changed things too. People stream their gameplay for cash, and that has led to a rapid professionalization of gaming that wasn't there in the era of demo recordings and an occasional LAN event. It makes for more incentives to hide cheating or gatekeep your game sessions behind private Discords etc.

Since the rise of Minecraft the games themselves have also gradually shifted towards being long-term platforms for streamer content, vs simply providing a fixed experience. Free-to-play economics likewise aim towards maximizing total lifetime value of each user(with a built in expectation of user turnover) instead of marketing towards the initial purchase.