The marvel reference is on point, because it’s the exact same thing that’s happened to movies.
I blame micro transactions, it uses addiction and predatory tactics.
It’s less that making unique games are risky, and more that there are less risky and more lucrative options available.
Couple that with greedy people finally recognizing gaming as another thing to get perpetual growth from and you get what we have today.
You don’t necessarily start losing people. Every commercial medium is like this. Seeking commercial success comes with an avalanche of self-censorship and cargo cultism. You’re casting the widest possible net and the product that you produce is only evaluated in terms of revenue. Unfortunately, certain kinds of really bad art sell very well.
The problem with consumers is they are too risk adverse
You can’t play every game so why spend money on something you don’t know if you’d like?
I think that isn‘t really the case though, is it?
Sure, there are those, who just play the latest Call Of Duty each year. But the success of very innovative games like Balatro, Papers Please, Vampire Survivors or even Breath of the Wild shows, that many consumers crave innovation, if it turns out to be fun innovation.
This also shows that these games can be found and appreciated, even if they‘re made by totally unknown people or studios.
They’re oddities not the norm unfortunately, this exists even within the same genre to an extent so I think asking people to leave the genre entirely is difficult to pull off
I don’t think BOTW counts for this though
Sorry, I’m not sure if I’m getting your point. I don’t think anyone’s asking anyone to leave their favorite genre for innovation’s sake. I just think these games show, that customers are totally ready to spend money on innovative games, even if they’re certainly rarer than less innovative titles. So I find it hard calling consumers risk adverse, in general.
I think they’re just adverse to games which aren’t fun, which could arguably be more common with more innovative titles, but, seeing Ubisoft’s downfall over the past few years, I’d argue that samey, “safe” games seem to be very low the average consumer’s fun scale as well.
I think game enthusiasts (i.e. people hanging on the Internet to talk about games) don’t realize the difference in sales for a successful innovative game (Stardew Valley for example) and mainstream games… Sure Stardew sold 40m copies since 2016, but CoD sells 10m+ every year!
