itch.io

Really difficult to read through your post.  I'll presume English is not your native language and/or you're using a machine translation.

There actually aren't all that many 'AAA grade' games being given for free each year.  Console is irrelevant to the itch.io platform unless you're selling console games.

If indie devs want to make memorable/amazing games, it takes a bit of a combination of factors to make it work.  The factors vary from person to person but for me it tends to be pretty simple.
-Strong well-written narrative.
-Fun gameplay with some kind of progression system (powerups like Metroid/Zelda or leveling systems like in most RPGs).
-Some kind of thinking/tactics involved in the combat that isn't just 'mash a single button to win'.
-Multiplayer is optional but a bonus; I prefer drop in/out multiplayer when possible.
-CUTSCENES AND STORY SEQUENCES SHOULD ALWAYS BE SKIPPABLE with a brief summary in a 'quest log' or equivalent.

The main reason that playtimes are going down is because IRL is becoming increasingly harsher while most people have to work longer hours and often multiple jobs just to pay their bills.  The younger generation with less disposable income tends to spend their time on free to play games because there are so many of them and many of the mobile ones are popular and free as well.

I feel that indie devs need to realize that they cannot demand attention because attention is a precious and ever-dwindling resource.  Between movies, anime, and other mediums, gaming tends to require a bit more activity and sometimes after a long day at work a person just wants to sit with a bowl of dessert and just watch some anime.  ^_^

Let me tell you why the old-school Blizzard Entertainment is so beloved/memorable.  They make great-quality games that work on a wide-variety of hardware and go out of their way to provide the BEST gaming stability & performance in the entire industry without equal.
Back in the days of Diablo 1 way back in 1996 the DirectX standard was still janky and not entirely reliable on a wide variety of hardware; even games like FreeLancer back in 2003 had an entire INI file dedicated to specific workarounds for hundreds of video card models!

So when I hear indie devs complaining about having to support a half-dozen AMD/Nvidia GPUs I kinda laugh a bit.  Suck it up and be thankful that the market has consolidated to only three major manufacturers (AMD/Intel/Nvidia) rather than the multiple types that used to be around in the early 2000s.

The unfortunate problem with the games market today is so many of these 'free to pay' games end up being nothing more than manipulative and exploitative skinner-boxes that utilize pavlovian conditioning to coerce minors & children into playing and paying compulsively rather than because they are having fun.  It is even worse in Korea/China/Japan where China's govt had to step in and force game developers to reveal the % droprates of every item in every single gamblebox they sell.

Now if only we'd get some govt intervention to force full source-code access to the RNG being used both client-side and server-side similar to the existing regulations present in actual real-money gambling machines in physical casinos.