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If I have picked up 500 spare ammo and I 73/100 bullets in my current gun, why will I end up with 473 spare ammo instead of 400 (losing the 73 unused rounds in the previous magazine)?
Is this just to make it easier on the player?
I want to make a challenge shooting game and it seems like timing your reloads would be interesting.
Is there any reason I should stick to the norm?
It's not true that "every game ever made" uses the reloading mechanic you've described. I can think of least one (Red Orchestra) that didn't, and others which I believe didn't as well (Day of Defeat, Rainbow Six).
But that's not the point.
This is simply a game mechanics decision, often made because the designers felt that the complexity introduced by a more complex or realistic reloading mechanic would not add any additional fun to the game (and in fact might actively annoy players). It's not all that dissimilar from the choice not to require characters to feed themselves, or stop for bathroom breaks, in most games.
Thus, the decision was made to opt for a simply mechanic that eschews realism in favor of a system that treats every gun as having a giant continuous "hopper" of bullets you just dump your spares into when you reload.
If you think you can build an interesting, fun mechanic by forcing players to be more careful with their reloads (and I think it's totally doable), then by all means go for it.
I was involved in the development of the halflife2 mod hidden-source, which enforces the 'full reload' strategy.
The reason for this is that we wanted the game to be very tense and give the marine players much more to worry about. We wanted to discourage spray-and-pray tactics by giving firing your weapon a large cost.
Each marine spawns with limited ammunition. Allowing them to reload partial magazines gave them too much freedom and changing damage/lowering ammo count made the weapons and the marine loadouts look unprofessional and unrealistic.
Actually in real life you use a dump pouch where you can quickly drop a non-empty magazine so you can refill it when there's a break in combat. Refilling or redistributing cartridges would probably not be well received by most modern gamers but if you are going for a more realistic take then I'm sure military personnel and gun-nuts would appreciate your focus on detail.
Instead of throwing your magazine away, couldn't developers choose to make reloading a half-emptied magazine longer. Since the player would need to remove bullets from a full magazine and place them in a half empty magazine. Except maybe for a revolver, it would reload faster with less bullets to fill the "magazine"
A lot of games encourage reloading before the clip is empty because this would be faster then let the system autoreload on empty magazine (Some more engagement of the player, because he has to monitor his clip and press the reload button instead of just holding down a button).
One could argue that during a fight, no soldier would do this. But no soldier would throw away a half emptied magazine either, there are no benefits for him doing that, except maybe that he is more capable of performing a longer burst/support.
I think you have to make a difference between a simulator or survival, versus a more arcade game. People want to think that when they shoot 6 bullets, after reloading it should be -6, and not -whatever magazine size is. While in a survival or sim, you want the real experience, and make a conscience disission if you want to have the benefit of a full clip during a burst/support or you rather preserve ammo
In short, there are two main stylistic camps; tactical and adrenaline.
Adrenalin design is much like it sounds, almost the candy of video games. Lone wolf, run-and-gun styles that make very little sense outside of that game world, or even in it, but are a cheap hook to get lots of players. Call of Duty, in recent years, has been a great example of this philosophy. This sort of design is often pursued by large, established studios where executive meddling is more rampant. However, some games, such as Halo, use the magazine limit as a sort of damper on weapon effectiveness for balance. Because they consider magazines very similarly to cool-down or spin-up, they don't use them as units of ammo like in the real world. There's some merit to that discussion. (For example, in Halo Combat Evolved, most human guns were good for 4 kills per magazine if every shot hit. This let them focus each weapon on role rather than a hierarchy.)
In tactical design, teamwork, tradeoffs, and thinking as you play are vaunted, but you lose some of the addictive adrenaline. This allows clever players who aren't necessarily as "twitchy" to stand on a level field with their hair-trigger foes. This sort of design is often more popular with smaller studios who can make non-mainstream calls like that. A great example is Frontlines: Fuel of War, where the assault rifle loadout got about a dozen magazines and half dozen launcher grenades. The result was that you could always be prepared for a shootout and and that some waste was acceptable, but 1-round mags were totally averted.
The conclusion is that you should use whatever fits your overarching vision for the game. Will it be more tactical? Give them lots of ammo, tie ammo to mags, and let them sort it out! Will it be more adrenalin-y? Don't make them think too hard!
Why can I suddenly heal catastrophic wounds by running over medical kits? It's called POETIC LICENCE. These are games, not simulations. As previously mentioned, things like Red Orchestra or the SWAT games are more realistic in this regards. Call Of Dudebro and the like possibly aren't.
The reason is that games usually have an audience they wish to target. There are people who enjoy playing realistic military simulators, and there are others, who enjoy more arcade-style shooters. If the game is planned for the second demographic in the above example, then a realistic reload system would just frustrate the players. There are plenty of video games using realistic reloading, but they usually have a different playing style as they target a different audience (these usually have other realistic settings, like bullet ballistics, reduced carrying capacity, more lethal wounds, no easy healing, horrible accuracy while moving, etc.).
To expand on what Josh Petrie and Alan B said, the broad, or general answer is that games employ various abstractions that remove parts of the real-world that the game developer decided are not contributing to the game-play they want, or is not worth the investment (or didn't make the cut, or they run out of time/money, or it collided with other(s) aspect(s) of the game that they decided to prefer one over the other, etc-etc). Whether it is HP instead of --for example-- blood lose, or critical hits instead of a major artery rupture, etc-etc.
On top of that, in many cases game developer sometimes just stick with what they saw in other games. Or in other words, "the norm" is sometime just lack of desire/resources to explore different ways of doing things or "don't fix it if it ain't broke" attitude, which can something leads to what can be regarded as unofficial tradition. Also, this may be a marketing decision (assuming it is easier to sell a game that the potential player base is already familiar with, i.e. more of the same).
Taking inspiration from other games is completely OK, but if there is some kind of aspect about a games (whether in this genre or another) that you personally think would be interesting to change, than don't get hung up about the current "state of the arts" too much.
The traditional way of doing things was not necessarily been establish by a vigorous process of trail and error.
