It's mostly that the loudest, angriest voices tend to drown out everyone else.
Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.
The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.
With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.
The game-hours-to-calendar-days translation won't be 1:1.
And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.
Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.
I think that the issue isn't so much 'the audience' but the terrible work conditions associated with the gaming industry.
> It really holds the medium back as an art form
How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.
It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.
Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.
What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.
That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.