Women and minorities are ignored. Prices are too high. Games are too long and too difficult. These aren’t the complaints of disgruntled consumers but observations from top gaming executives at the South by Southwest games festival in Austin, Texas.

In front of an audience at the Hyatt Regency, the panel of experts explored why the industry has been failing at converting non-players into players. The main culprits: an over-reliance on $100-million-plus blockbusters, a difficult learning curve and a lack of diverse narratives.

While Wall Street analysts and industry boosters like to cite financial figures that show the game business as one that’s bigger than the film industry, such numbers mask an uncomfortable reality: The number of dedicated gamers is not growing.

“The actual universe of gamers isn’t expanding that much,” said Alexis Garavaryan, who works closely with indie developers at Microsoft. Garavaryan noted players have more choices regarding where to play today, and an influx of casual gamers on mobile devices isn’t necessarily creating repeat customers.

“Core gamers haven’t expanded that much,” he said. “They’re just more fragmented.”

The panel, which also featured Jack Mathews, co-owner of Armature Studio, and Kynan Pearson, creative director at Bluepoint Games, sought to unravel the reasons why. There wasn’t a ton of room for optimism in the hourlong discussion. In fact, one audience member during the question-and-answer session accused the panelists of being all “doom and gloom.”

If the conversation could be boiled down to one core thesis, it would likely be that console and PC games have simply become too intimidating for the uninitiated. There’s a high barrier to entry, in cost and learning curve, as most top-shelf games today are sold for about $60 apiece and then require players to master a controller with a dozen-plus buttons. Then many games expect players to invest upward of 20 hours, minimum.

“If you look at every single entertainment medium that exists — watching television has gotten easier, everything is on demand,” Pearson said. “Watching movies has gotten easier — you can basically view movies without effort. You used to have to go the theater or put in a tape. ... Video games are the only medium where it’s gotten more and more complicated to even get to the point of playing a game.”

Games, consoles and powerful PCs can be pricey, and then there’s the operating system that has to be learned. Often, games need to be updated, and players will be asked to log into online accounts. Pearson argued film, television and music are more instantly accessible than any game.

Worse, Mathews pointed out that today’s games are more complex. He mentioned the original “Super Mario Bros.” from the early ’80s for the Nintendo Entertainment System, telling the audience that anyone could learn that game within a minute.