Its really wrong to assume that because someone is under 30 they are "casual". I'm casual. I game maybe 5% as much as I used to back in the day. Probably play more Hearthstone on my phone than anything. The people without careers, wives, kids, mortgages, etc etc...they have got the time to be hardcore. What do you see at the professional/competative level in gaming? Sure as hell not old people. The most hardcore are the youngs...doing insane 20 hour marathons...spending thousands of hours in WoW, LoL, Dota, etc, managing to play FPS games on a console with some squeaky voiced 12 year old shit talking over voice chat. They stand in line for new releases, they get fanboi rage over console brands...they are relatively nuts.
Hat's off to them.
And they aren't stupid. They know they are getting ripped off with microtransactions. They know they are paying full price for part of a game. They do think about it, they are concerned about it, and they do rage about it online. The "casuals" are the millions of old people playing facebook games and whatever the current mobile game crazy is. Casuals don't spend big money on hardware.
As has been pointed out...none of this is new. None of it is "the future". Its something really irritating that we've been putting up with for most of this century so far. And, in fact, most of this "the future" stuff has been eschewed by the majority of games...increasingly so as time wears on.
As for PC gaming...its pretty much as its always been. A vocal minority occupying the premium niche. The masses on the other hand have always been plugging Nintendo's and such in TV sets. Clear back to the 1970's. I remember playing Mario on NES one day...and then seeing Doom for the first time the next. Watershed moment.
Having said all of that...it makes no sense to defend and justify anti-consumer business practices because "its the future". Its not the future. Its the present. And its been the same for years. The only think we the consumers can do is vote with our wallets, just as we always have. And our money spends the same regardless of how long we've been gamers.