The title chosen by the OP is contained in the second half of the article:
> “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today,” Meier says. “I’m not sure even I would play it. It wouldn’t fit in the zeitgeist. It asks a lot of the player, and takes a while to work it out. You have to play it once in order to understand what's going on. You have to be willing to spend time with it, and that’s not where most gamers are these days. Civ came out at the perfect time. The PC had got beefy enough for us to make it, but weren’t inundated with so many possibilities. If it had been created two years earlier we’d only have had four colours and it would have been much shallower.”
It also represents a change in the mystery of computers and games. It was esoteric and fascinating to see stuff even happen on screen. This made people want to try and dive in.
I think this issue is even larger, the web also suffers from this. It's all streamlined and a commercial endpoint.. very very different from the beginnings.
