I want to add a few cents to this discussion, specifically about the Civilization franchise.
Civ5 went on sale during the Steam sale for ~7.50, I think it was, plus the Brace New World expansion was discounted as well.
Civ5 was garbage at release, riddled with bugs that made the game unplayable, and an AI that was so brain dead it exploited itself. Even players of average skill like myself were able to best the AI on the highest difficulty settings. Add in all the DLC packs for civilizations that were removed from the base game, the dumbed down gameplay, and the paid expansions that added back in basic features from its predecessor, and Civilization 5 is best described as a stain on the franchise. And yet, if one looks at /r/gaming, redditors are gushing over it. Its the greatest 4X game ever made, with players dropping a dozen hours at a time in it. I'm not sure of the ages of the players, but I'm going to make an educated guess that most never played any previous Civilization games. After IV, the penultimate evolution of the franchise so far, I've been utterly unable to spend more than an hour or so at time in 5. And I've played Civ2, 3, and 4 extensively. Steam has me at nearly 600 hours in CivIV, and that doesn't include the retail boxed copy I bought when it was released.
I've only preordered a few games in my 20 years of PC gaming because every time I do, Murphy's Law kicks in and whatever I preordered ends up being a worthless, unplayable shit stain. Civilization 5 rates as one of the worst pre orders I've ever done, 60 frickin dollars. I could have bought a decent amount of craft beer and gotten more entertainment.
Now, to be fair, some of the worst bugs have been fixed. I gave Civ5 another chance shortly after Gods and Kings was released, Amazon had it on sale for cheap and it was Steam ready, so I snapped it up. The AI's been polished up considerably, though still pretty dumb, it at least doesn't just hand victory to the player any more. The city limit bug appears to have been fixed, and the complete texture terrain redraw issues seem to have been fixed. But, the pacing is still off, where I can research gun powder and before I can complete training of my first Musketman, I've developed rifling. Didn't even get a chance to pop his combat cherry. I know mods exist to correct some of those problems, but one shouldn't need mods to fix basic game play.
And yet, because of the positive sales, publishers will think this is the crap people want. Shallow gameplay, loads of Zero Day DLC, and show stopping bugs will be ignored. We'll just get more of the same.
This saddens me because the historical 4X genre has been one of my favorites for nearly 2 decades, and its now suffering the same rot that's bring down other, more popular genres like FPSs.