Yes, the fundamental issue is that most gamers in the West have adopted the bizarre notion that games should be valued according to how much money was spent developing them, rather than a game's quality and duration. All too many people are willing to pay $60-70 for AAA games while insisting that an indie game should cost perhaps $15-20, even if the indie game provides better quality for a similar length of time relative to AAA games. Indie games are intrinsically aimed at a narrower, niche audience, but a good indie game will provide this target audience with the quality it seeks in a manner that cannot be found in AAA games that appeal to a wider, lowest-common-denominator audience.
Meanwhile, digital storefronts have become dominated by deep discounts, training consumers to purchase games ever more cheaply, except for the occasional just-released AAA full-price purchase. This is compensated for only to a limited extent by the tendency of gamers to amass a digital backlog of games, since the backlog consists largely of games purchased for peanuts, when they had their price temporarily slashed during a sale or with a price permanently plunged to almost nothing. Moreover, the accumulation of a backlog simply results in gamers becoming even less willing to pay full price for an indie game, instead waiting until a new release is similarly discounted nearly to nothing.
Codexers should be particularly cognizant that a game's value is determine by the combination of the game's duration and quality for the person actually playing it, who might have tastes that differ radically from the general gaming community.
