It’s a really weird, happy and sad state of affairs.
You had Elden Ring, bunch of great indie games in 2022.
Then in 2023. Capcom hits it out of the park with SF6 and Remake4. Tears of the Kingdom came out. Then Baldur’s Gate 3, a sequel 20+ years later. Metroid Prime remastered. Dead Space remake. Diablo 4
This was following Forsaken, Redfall, Gollum. Then you have Atlas Fallen recently with bad reviews
I’m having fun, but it seems indie Devs are having more success with original IPs and smaller scopes
Your post got me thinking. The huge shift in Hollywood and gaming to almost exclusively be reboots, remasters, and sequels speaks to an over all problem in the gaming industry. If you compare how game companies were run on average in the mid 90’s vs now, I think you’d see a lot more companies in the 90’s were ran like startups, you had a group of talented passionate devs who had a grand vision and wanted to make something they’d love playing too. Those passion type companies yielded us games like Halo 1, nearly everything from Bullfrog Entertainment, looking glass studios and the thief series.
When you think of now, gaming is a much much much larger industry and many more companies are ran and old by mega large companies, who want to squeeze every dollar out of consumers. Battle passes, micro transactions in full price games, buggy and unfinished releases, and may other scummy things. The reason we’re seeing much more in terms of reboots/remasters and sequels is, these large companies look at their bottom line and are extremely risk adverse, they’re much more motivated by the profit then the passion of it, and as such want “Sure Things” instead of risky new IPs.
This is just a side effect of our favorite hobby getting so much more main stream. When huge companies only care about the profits and keeping their stock prices up, it’s less about the passion more about greed. I hate it, but there isn’t a solution.
Well, a solution could be, to dont buy AAA-Games. Or only games that are worth it. No hype train purchases month before release, no blind trust in big names of games or publishers or studios.
At least demos are a thing again.
Ps: don’t buy battlepasses or skins in f2p would also help I guess.