Yep, and you see it in a lot of long running franchises...the tendency in video gaming for some years now has been to casualize casualize casualize, or as the folks up in the
PR Department like call it..."Making the experience more accessible to a wider audience". This approach is best typified by the somewhat famous "When you press a button,something awesome has to happen!" quote from Bioware while promoting Dragon Age 2.
While this approach often works from a sales standpoint,in the long run it almost always results in a decline in quality and the eventual disenfranchisement of the original core audience who become frustrated and inevitably move on to other things as the game slowly drifts away from all of the elements that attracted them to the game in the first place.
The AAA video game industry is like Hollywood in that they'd generally rather continue to make a mediocre product that makes 200 million than a quality product that makes 50 million.The only time the trend really reverses is when they bungle something so badly that people walk away en masse.