Your typical next-gen console game costs upwards of 25 million dollars to develop - which is mostly paying for the 150+ person development team and their equipment for a few years. That's not even touching the marketing budget, which is often as large. You need to have a million-plus selling title to even hope to break even. And unlike movies, there's no real secondary revenue - DVD sales, syndication rights, etc. While it's not unheard of for someone to purchase a 5 year old or 10 year old movie, game sales are basically zero after a year or two. And between pirates and used-game sales (which rape the industry, especially when stores like EB sell used copies like they're new), your chances of success are very rough.

The industry's core business model is very much at risk. With each successive generation, increasing numbers of small developers are forced to get acquired or go bankrupt. Someone mentioned Valve in this thread - hell, Valve is one of the few successful independent developers remaining! If the next generation of consoles sees another tripling in cost (like the previous one did), there will be very few companies left standing.

Given this climate, it's not surprising that companies are desperately doing everything they can to generate revenue. Ads are annoying, yes - but it's not like developers are putting ads in the game just to make an extra buck. And ads are just the beginning - it won't be long until the big players switch to entirely digital distribution, which will eliminate used-game sales and the retailer's cut and drastically reduce piracy.

These changes may have a negative impact on the user experience, but if game developers can't find more sources of revenue there will be no user experience at all.

You can't really separate 'programming' from 'software engineering'. Developing software is a holistic process - it requires problem-solving ability, strong synthesis and analysis skills, excellent judgement, and a healthy dose of imagination. At every point, you have to decide between dozens of different trade-offs - between scalability and performance, robustness and readability, maintainability and development time. Good programmers are the ones who can balance these attributes to craft the right solution for the problem at hand. Great programmers are able to redefine the problem entirely.