Chemical123 said:
Those are all valid points.
The thing is, the biggest culprit seems to be the need to make sure most games' budgets conform to AAA norms. Players are used to lavish cinematics, hours and hours of gameplay time, extensive customization and a certain modicum of freedom, and offering these things costs money - on top of the ever-increasing graphics pipeline.
The only way you can recoup the cost of a typical AAA title is if it sells like hot cakes. A JRPG not selling hugely isn't a tragedy, normally, largely because there's maybe one or two titles in that genre that qualified as benchmark titles for their console of choice. FFVII is a chief example of that, in regards to the PSOne. Most of everything else can coast on by looking average, so long as the art direction is impressive, the combat or RPG-esque mechanics are gripping or the plot happens to be somewhat worthy of some analysis. Squeenix has its own take on art direction (I don't really need to introduce Tetsuya Nomura and his Gackt fetish), they have decades of play systems to revisit if they so chose, and JRPGs already come with the guarantee that you'll be saddled with something that's up there with the sappiness of a Diablo title, coupled with an upteenth lesson on friendship or love. They have a few basic narrative hooks that they keep revisiting, but it does seem to work well for them.
The long and short of it is that JRPGs have enough of a following and enough strengths or quirks to draw in a substantial player base.
The problem really lies in devs not so much seeing a problem as profit that could be made. Resident Evil 6 turned into an unofficial Gears of War clone precisely in order to belatedly court the Shooter crowd. Single-Player's been minced into bloodless chunks in the Call of Duty titles for the simple reason that the multiplayer masses are providing Activision with an argument to cut costs and reinvest in what APPEARS to be selling copies. Similarly, the horror genre APPEARS to have been eradicated on consoles because the Shooter crowd's generated profits are several times higher than anything Outlast's PS4 release could hope to produce.
Ultimately, Jim is especially right at the conclusion of the episode. In chasing profits, the publishers tend to sap all energy or creativity out of their yearly-iterated darlings. That leaves us with little miracles (Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, in my honest opinion) amidst a drove of fairly samey episodes. Play one AC and you've mostly played all of them.
It's like tending to crops, essentially. Over-harvest what a given plot of land has to offer, and you exhaust the soil's minerals faster than they can be regenerated. If farmers rotate crops to keep the soil fresh, then maybe publishers should stop thinking that they ABSOLUTELY have to rake in the millions, and instead start on a schedule of sorts.
This is just me postulating, though - but I do think that system could work. Quarter One is your Shooters quarter, the second is your RPGs-devoted one, the third is geared towards Open-World stuff and the fourth would be a kind of three month-long Amnesia Fortnight. Sports games would be iterated more slowly, with prices for released titles staying at full retail for slightly longer than they already do. That would discourage basic "roster update"-type yearly releases.
