Is it possible that the market is now so saturated with games of all kinds that it's simply hard to find enough customers to care about each separate product? Between smartphone app stores, Facebook games, a half dozen different consoles, an endless supply of entertainment through Steam, Kickstarter and (basically free) Bundles of all sorts, it must be really difficult to stand out without a truly unique product and phenomenal marketing.
As some of you folks pointed out, it's turning into a race to the bottom similar to the music industry, where people won't even play your product for free, even when it's really high quality. Think of all the games you accumulated through Steam sales and never even touched. It's a brutal war over the spare time of the average gamer, and it's highly contested space.