| I remember writing up an article about this a while (long while) back. Sales trends, as most of you are probably aware of, spiked and showed that the majority of gamers were not actually kids, but adults (google it; it's out there; I don't have the info anymore). So for a while, games were really going where the target audience pointed to.
Enter the Wii. Everyone made fun of it, thought it was a "fad," and would not last. I remember on my old site, I posted a debate & said the Wii would be the #1 console before this Christmas. Everyone said I was crazy! Look what's up now? Damn, I'm good...
Anyway, it's the market trend. Seeing the huge success of the Wii (my main argument was price, but also that the simplicity of the games, lack of many shooters, family participation & "exercise," etc), MS and Sony (which has always been more family-friendly, imo, than MS) see that cash cow & want to get in on that; was taking a more serious-gamer attitude actually a bad idea? Certainly not. But that's a huge market there, and the only obvious thing is to get in on it.
Back in the board game days, I think those were meant for the "family night" thing - had to do more than watch a movie, right? There wasn't a whole lot of video gaming to be had, so it was the next best thing... Today, people are so damn busy, that video games kind of fill a void of some sort. Now that they're so main stream that people don't just think of them as "toys for geeks," they're becoming a family commodity. But you're not gonna find too many families sitting around & creating a CoD4 clan, so the easier, quick pick-me-up games like Arcade are having a huge pull on getting families to spend time together...
It's an addition to the industry. People are still gonna have their shooters, single-player RPGs and whatever; but with easy to play games, families are now pulling on the video gaming market, too. It's here to stay. | 
