Game companies started to broaden their reach, to expand their demographic. The same is happening with Facebook. I watched my mother play game after game of Bejeweled. Facebook's reach is huge, well beyond the demographic usually thought of as gamers, that 18-35 male collective cash cow. I'm not on Facebook, but my mother is, my aunt is, the sort of person that kinda likes clicking cows. Zynga's games are close to their tolerance: easy, always there, not too deep. The gaming equivalent of a Will Smith summer blockbuster, the type that upsets the people that really love movies. A McDonald's burger, a Mariah Carey song, Marlboro Lights, Windows XP, Zynga: the suburbs of their industry. It may not be loved by critics, but damned if you can't make more money selling to a broader demographic than to a smaller group of devoted genre fans.
So, on a much larger scale, we're seeing the games market broaden and develop, the same way that we saw it happen 10 or 15 years ago. There's hope for the future: you can still get rich making an iPhone/Android $2 game or a Minecraft, so we still have some sort of vibrance, sparks flying from the souls of the passionate and creative. But the way things are, there's more money in Farmville. I've stopped being angsty and dropped my elitism: you can't fight basic laws of commerce or Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap").
I value my time, so I don't play social games (unless you count GitHub), but the customers have indeed decided what they want, or at least what they'll pay for.
...Where's my copy of Ninja Gaiden? I still haven't beaten it in two decades.