Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Digital distribution of video games" in English language version.
[...] [Good Old Games] focuses on bringing old, time-tested games into the downloadable era with low prices and no DRM.
The worst days [for game development] were the cartridge days for the NES. It was a huge risk – you had all this money tied up in silicon in a warehouse somewhere, and so you'd be conservative in the decisions you felt you could make, very conservative in the IPs you signed, your art direction would not change, and so on. Now it's the opposite extreme: we can put something up on Steam [a digital distributor], deliver it to people all around the world, make changes. We can take more interesting risks.[...] Retail doesn't know how to deal with those games. On Steam there's no shelf-space restriction. It's great because they're a bunch of old, orphaned games.
The jump in development and marketing costs has made the videogame industry "enormously risk-averse,[...]Publishers have largely focused on making sequels to successful titles or games based on a movie or comic book characters, which are seen as less risky. "We don't greenlight any more things that will be small or average size games.[...]"[permanent dead link]
