Here is a fact for you, When Civ I first came out, game budgets where small, teams where small, and designs where simple. Civ, in itself was probably one of the largest undertaking in terms of scale during that entire era. Comparatively, games did not consume much more than a meg or 2 of space on your computer, graphics where tiny 8x8 or 16x16 sprites, music was midi, and an entire game could be developed by 2-3 people with minimal investment. the Audience the developers where writing for was small, even large budget games had a small footprint on the world in general. There where half-finished games, I can remember a number of times I was upset with my purchase because it kept crashing or other problems. The games that didn't have as many problems rose to the top, but in many ways, I wish some of those unfinished games had a medium to be fixed.
Enter the modern game development world, teams consist of anywhere between 50 and 200+ people, budgets scale in the millions and tens of millions, graphics are rendered in glorious spectacles of high definition and 3D graphics, Music is Orchestral and professionally created, games now span 5-10GB of space, that's several orders of magnitude in scale difference from 1-2MB. Finally, gaming nowadays is the largest entertainment medium on the planet with the sole exception of Music, and with a larger audience always comes a larger portion of that audience that is unhappy with said product.
In the past, we didn't call a game mechanic broken and get pissed off until it was fixed, we worked around it until it didn't matter to us anymore. The Internet has done 2 things to the game industry, it has given developers an opportunity for a 2nd or even 3rd chance, and it has given consumers a medium to call a game mechanic broken rather than live with it.
TLDR; Games are bigger and more complex now, The internet has given both developers and consumers opportunities they would have never had at one point in time.
