>Companies realise they can invest less and less time into a project yet still charge the same for it because people will still buy it.

If you take a look at the data mining "achievements" in games these days, you can clearly see the problem is that there are a large number of people that drop the game near the beginning, and that the people who drop the game outnumber the one's that finish the game. Looking at one example on steam, 19% of people have finished one game while 24% haven't even finished the tutorial, with numbers steadily dropping after that. It's become more profitable for mainstream companies to sell some nice box art and exploit these people rather than make games for the people that play games.

>grinding in rpgs
Do people still put up with this shit? If a game is forcing you to grind enemies for low chance drops, then you need to play a different game.