The Danger of Chasing Trends. Chasing trends was once possible, but now games just take way too long to develop. This strategy that once worked, might not be ideal anymore.
Problem is that executives and capitalists are the dumbest, least creative people alive and chasing trends is all their underdeveloped brains are capable of. Just look at the bizarre AI mania.
LLMs are definitively chasing trends. THATS HOW THEY WORK. No wonder the treat printers print such uninspired slop... and no wonder the treat printer apologists have such poor taste to begin with, wanting infinite waifu printouts with bland cyberpunkerino dressings.
What gets me is that there are games that, if made, would obviously print money and people would love. It requires minimal creativity or thought.
Make the pokemon MMO.
Make the chao garden.
Half Life 3
Right off the top of my head. There are so many games that people beg for that get avoided like we're asking for healthcare. I'm not even asking for something cool like a 3D platform fighter that makes them have to shit their pants because it's not formulaic.
I'll never forgive profit extraction and investment returns sticking their nose into every last facet of society
I've been compling many many different ways to make Pokémon better for years; the universe has just gotten to big for Gamefreak to keep monopolizing it and releasing the same unfinished bullshit every year knowing there's a bunch of people who will just buy it anyway.
Given that gamefreak couldn’t get Scarlet/Violet to run at a steady frame rate despite the simple, outdated graphics, I can’t imagine that them attempting that but with hundreds of players per server would result in anything other that an absolutely broken game.
I genuinely doubt there are more than a handful of creatives in the industry who even know anything other than the trends. It's not like the vast majority of indie devs produce anything other than cheap uncreative attempts at copying some other big indie hit. The gaming industry is simply creatively bankrupt to the core, gamers are too stupid to make art.
Chasing trends never really worked because the initial game that set the trend has already eaten up the potential user base and there's little room for another. Like look at cod, has there ever been a successful competitor? I think the only trend chasing that worked was battle royales but that was because pubg was a half baked mess that never really saw any major changes.
They pretend to be, but at the core they're very different games.
Battlefield is a military sandbox with a focus on immersion and atmosphere. Lots of vehicles. An actual projectile based bullet system. Large team based gameplay.
COD is an arcade shooter with 'hitscan' weapons, focused on fast paced gameplay on small maps. Actual vehicles weren't even a thing until warzone.
I'm looking at Veilguard and hoping that they didn't derail the game too hard after BG3's success. I just want Dragon Age to be its own thing and moving away from big pillars of worldbuilding like blood magic reeks of trying to be more mainstream fantasy
Speaking as somebody who used to live within visual range of BioWare's headquarters: don't get your hopes up. The "studio" has been swirling the toilet ever since the back half of Dragon Age 2 (and most of its ALREADY MADE DLC!) got "scrapped", then turned into Inquisition.
The "studio" has been swirling the toilet ever since the back half of Dragon Age 2 (and most of its ALREADY MADE DLC!) got "scrapped", then turned into Inquisition.
Battle Royales are such a great example of this, because it’s a genre that inherently can’t have more than a couple big games in it or they’ll eat each other's audience.
If you so desperately want to make another battle royale start development in a couple years and release it in 2030 when maybe some people have stopped playing Fortnite and Apex.
To be fair, there were a ton of mario clones, sonic clones, hell, arcades even had a ton of games imitating popular trends. It's never not been a part of the industry, we just forget all the games chasing trends because they always mediocre and forgettable.
This is why the market got flooded with a bajillion “cozy life simulator” games the last couple years. Developers saw Animal Crossing New Horizons sell like mad in 2020 and went “copy that.” Never mind that they couldn’t replicate the established franchise or releasing right at the start of lockdown elements.