The free to play listen to player feedback and incorporate related design or development features in a timely manner. If there's a bug they fix it. If they want a new feature, they strongly consider it. The AAA gaming industry has been inwardly focused for about 10 years now. Watch The Game Awards and you see its just like the Oscars. Awards going to a lot of very obscure titles for checking some box on the social justice agendas. Some games like CS2 stay at the top by simply not making major changes for the worse when they already have a winning formula for their market that nobody wants to see changes.

Aside from the California-western europe developer culture, I think a lot of it has to do with the people above AAA gaming who make the major decisions are not themselves in the industry but in enterprise services or the business community. Microsoft top people may know how to squeeze profits out of enterprise customers but they've been clueless on gaming.