Things in the 80's crashed for multiple reasons. Chief among them was the huge ego corporate triple A owners had grown, and thought they were geniuses and too big to crash. Rather than listen to their users and focus on what made them successful, they took the franchises into better directions and utterly failed the franchises. They also decided to focus on the console market in retaliation to inflated piracy claims on the PC side. Programming became console centric and flopped on the PC side of things. Simplified console controls do not work well on a PC setup. Other things like the casual game market wasn't even being tracked at that time. It wasn't until later that the popcap games type operations became noticed, by the gaming industry and were counted, when their incomes rose above a billion dollars a year each. Create a simple code frame and slap new artwork over and over onto the same thing and you now have a new genre of hidden object games. Were just getting that same thing with all of the remaster craze coming out for successful AAA games. Even Skyrim is getting some new face paint, and being dropped onto the fallout 4 frame, which is more or less a debugged and beefed up version of the same engine used on the original Skyrim. One point of relief is the recognition that it is the PC that has gotten the cr4edit for the long extensions of lifetimes to these franchises, as well as creating whole new cash opportunities on the console side of things. It's one reason that the remastered Skyrim is being given away to current owners of the full editions of Skyrim.
I totally disagree with your sentiments about developers and publishers back in the 80s, it was a golden era. Console wars at the end of the 80s were not that big, everyone was happy.
Developers and Publishers were more open and would take anyone into their fold if they shown promise to further develop them also.
It wasn't until the latter half of the 90s that things started to heat up, due to warez usage becoming the norm, this forced developers and publishers down a different path. Around the same time PC gaming became stronger and more noticed by the public.
Bear in mind this wasn't just for the gaming industry, but everywhere, as share holders and public shares were becoming more and more accessible, and those share holders became the power behind businesses not the owners themselves, for good or bad they were in control.