The game must somehow reward the player with equipment. It would be a bit boring if we got 1-2 interesting items during ten hours of the game.
Equipment is definitely one of those things that translates very badly into games.
You can argue that in older games, indeed magic items were rarer, but now the design of the games looks a bit different.
Even such a pathfinder which probably most resembles games from the infinite engine era literally floods you with magical items worth thousands of gp.
After all, a lot of magic items = a lot of gp.
Another thing is that virtually every game has a problem with too much currency inflation. Gold is very rarely any problem other than the very beginning of the game, then you might as well buy half the kingdom.
