I'm currently going through a phase of setting up a games room, and acquiring a bunch of slightly older video game consoles and games to populate it. I've settled on PS2 and PS3, and Xbox/360 as the sweet spot for this. Partly due to price (they're not old enough to be worth much, but not new enough to be hawked at retail prices).

But a factor just as big as price is how, from about mid-360 and PS3 onwards, gaming stopped being a case of 'buy a disc and play the game' and became 'register online, tie to a service which will be withdrawn at some point, and pay extra for bits of the game that would previously have been free'. All of that stuff transformed gaming media from about 2007 onwards from something that you could put on a shelf and return to at your leisure, into this ephemeral thing that you must buy into at the peak of the hype cycle, or it won't exist in proper form (if at all) when you do get around to it.

That said, this phenomenon is mostly limited to commercial games. There's an incredible grassroots movement of indie, modding, and retro gaming that everyone is free to immerse and engage in, where this issue just doesn't exist. My reaction to cutting-edge gaming for the past decade or so has been largely to turn away from commercial games and find entertainment via other gaming channels.