Maybe it's a cultural shift, that is, people can get information about a game - reviews, etc - a lot more and easier than back then when you depended on just the right issue of gaming magazines. Alternatively, the best you had was looking at the back of a game's box to get the gist of it.
But with shareware you often went in blind, especially once CD-ROMs became a thing (attached to magazines) with dozens if not hundreds of shareware games and applications. The culture was one of browsing and trying stuff out.
Nowadays it's more about being able to build up hype and brand / name awareness over time, with peak moments being e.g. the E3 conference. More recent even is streaming on Twitch and let's plays on youtube, allowing people to see the game before buying it themselves. And of course there's free-to-play or low cost games with in game purchases and/or live services.
I don't find reviews to be a substitute for demos; there's always a strong element of "if you like games like this then..."
I pretty much only buy Steam games on sale now, not (just) because I'm a skinflint, but because I've learned the expensive way that I'll uninstall most games within half an hour or so or starting them. Even well-reviewed ones. Even ones that won Game Of The Year.
"Liking video games" is like "liking books". Typically people prefer certain kinds of games or books, and may find any particular example enjoyable or not.
Nobody questions whether I "like books" when I say The Lost World was a lackluster sequel to Jurassic Park, right? Because there is no expectation that somebody who enjoyed one particular book should like every book, even within the same genre or franchise.
I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.
Or possibly, he knows his taste very well and is extremely selective. Some people may only be willing to invest serious time into games that fit their tastes close-to-perfectly.
I wager you don't like most critically acclaimed books, but that certainly doesn't mean you dislike books. Rather, it's just a reflection of the fact that there is such wide variety of books that anybody is unlikely to like most of them.
Well, I've been playing them for about 35 years now, so pretty sure.
Of course, obvious side-effects of advanced fogeydom include having less free time, being harder to impress with novelty, and losing the reflexes needed for some genres.
This seems like a loaded question -- do you mean to imply that to "like video games" you must like "all video games" including inherently broken and ones that promise the world in tech demo/e3 while delivering garbage on release date?
Just because one "likes books" does not mean that they should be forced to suffer gleefully through turds like Dr. Phil's "Self Matters".
As above, I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.
Dunkey presented a fairly well-argued idea why major publications tend to give 9+/10 reviews to games, even when the actual text of their review clearly points to major issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI).
The tl;dw version is that gamers, by and large, tend to disparage media outlets for giving poor ratings to games that aren't already widely disliked by the hive mind. It comes from the perspective of someone who does unbiased VG reviews, and I think it raises an interesting point that might otherwise be overlooked. (Of course, payola should certainly not be discounted as a factor.)
Now that you can download the full game from steam and return it for a full refund, who would prefer to play the demo? That said, you can find all kinds of demos in console stores.
But with shareware you often went in blind, especially once CD-ROMs became a thing (attached to magazines) with dozens if not hundreds of shareware games and applications. The culture was one of browsing and trying stuff out.
Nowadays it's more about being able to build up hype and brand / name awareness over time, with peak moments being e.g. the E3 conference. More recent even is streaming on Twitch and let's plays on youtube, allowing people to see the game before buying it themselves. And of course there's free-to-play or low cost games with in game purchases and/or live services.