pretty true, but it does FEEL like theres been too much bandwagoning. At least too much for the game industry's size. We've had too many World of Warcraft copycats, and hardly any alternative takes on Eve Online. Call of Duty's influence has made Capcom and Square Enix terribly shortsighted, in how they tried to action-up, and consolidate their franchises of FF and ResiEvil for demographics who mainly did console multiplayer and didn't care, leaving their real fans upset.Lilani said:Because there aren't as many AAA game devs as there are big Hollywood filmmakers just yet. Only a handful of studios and developers create what we think of as "AAA games." Hollywood does as much jumping onto bandwagons and market trends as video games do--have you SEEN the number of vampire and "teen female falls in love with hot supernatural teen male" movies coming out since Twilight? The difference is there are so fewer game devs that make AAA games that when they hop on a bandwagon, pretty much all of them do so because there simply aren't enough of them to fill two bandwagons. Hollywood has enough studios and filmmakers to supply both the "teen vampire" and the "Michael Bay splosion fest" bandwagons. But video games just don't have enough AAA devs to fill two bandwagons without one being the odd one out, and the entire point of hopping on a bandwagon is to NOT be the odd one out.Andrew Siribohdi said:Why can't there be a Hunger Games video game as a traditional AAA game while traditional market continues to have Battlefield on the other end of the spectrum?
I think things are certainly getting better, but due to the nature of this cowardly bandwagon jumping it's not moving along as fast as we would like.
What games are better off doing is seeing the weakness in popular titles whether in theme content or gameplay and using that as a springboard to provide experiences that are only similar at surface level, since they take longer to program.