I work in the game industry actually, it's always interesting seeing what an outside perspective of it is like. Oftentimes, it's staggeringly different from what the reality of it is.

Fact is, while some of the massive, sprawling games described above would sure be fun, they would take somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade to make in some cases, with large teams and absurd budgets.

The Wii is not responsible for the influx of casual gamers, if you're going to point at any one thing as the source of that you should be looking at phones. Because of app games, there has been a flood of casual gamers who never touched a game before in their lives. These are people who play games while on busses or otherwise commuting too and from work, and they want games that fit that time frame. That's where you get games like Candy Crush and so many other app games- you may have noticed that the levels are often quite short, or there are breaks frequently. This is because the target market for these games are people who tend to only have a few minutes to play at a time, rather than the many-hours long daily sessions that more hardcore gamers have.

Trust me when I say that a huge number of designers would love to build more hardcore games, but the fact is that the market just doesn't really support that. Making a game costs a huge amount of money, and sadly there just aren't as many people who are willing to buy a game like Dark Souls vs. some stupid little reskin of an app game. Investors know this, and as a result it's hard to even get the money together for an ambitious, hardcore, innovative triple-A game when the people with the money feel safer investing in what is currently proven to work.

Yes, there are companies that try to ride on the coattails of others (I worked at one briefly, absolutely horrible place that I think is now out of business) but a lot of studios, especially the smaller ones, are composed of really passionate gamers who want to make things like are being described here, but for various reasons- be they financial or logistical- can't manage it.