What happened? Izi: corporization and gaming reaching mass media.
The moment corpos realized that games were making a morbilion dollars they wanted to explode it, but because they never undertand what videogames are they just do what they known to do: standardization and push for mainstream media. Before 2008-2009 everyone where doing their own crap, now every companies just follow whats popular and try to make it to the stream circles: The CoD clones wanna be era (Halo 4, Syndicate), the MOBA/e-sport Leage of Legends wanna be era (Halo 5, CoD from these years, and many others games that lived and died like battleborn) and now the live service era where everything is a job and everything has to be like Fortnite (Warzone, Halo Infinite [343 are the perfect example of this], Gran Turismo).
Just as modern day example of standarization: just look at game controllers right now, they are all the same, the more unique is the dual sense of Playstation but barely any dev use it. If you want to properly use the track pad you must connect your PS4/5 controller to Steam and then add functions like menus, clicks, etc. Back in 2005 they tried to do their crap, now is to be next hit. And this is sadly something you can see on today consoomers, another somewhat recent example: Final Fantasy XIV v1.0, it was practically a remake of FFXI with all its design choices, is has its issues, but it was salvage (lets not pretend like ARR is good, btw), but instead of working on something unique they trash everything and transform it into a WoW clone. And people praise it for it, they choose mediocre thinking instead of having something unique, is not like WoW servers are close or anything.