Not talking about less than macro scales so don’t get pedantic about some exception. The early days were limited by silicon tech and memory storage, but those don’t exist any more. So why is it that game music and pop cultural music have not seemingly cross pollinated? Micro genres? Other?
They have different purposes.
Listening music is intended for a broad spectrum of “use cases”, but gaming music often needs to drive a specific emotion at a very specific time, be repeated if a gamer takes too long to complete an area, drive world building for an area, etc.
And just because the tech has changed doesn’t mean the social expectations have. We expect game music to have specific characteristics because it’s what we’re used to.