I've always posited that with the AAA industry, we've seen a reduction of genres because of exponentially expanding budgets. In previous generations games could be made for far less, and because of that could appeal to a smaller number of people yet still break even or turn a profit. Now every game is massive and needs to sell millions upon millions of units just to get by. Because of that, developers and publishers have to appeal to the masses and the lowest common denominator.
We saw the start of this last gen with tacked on multiplayer. So many games added multiplayer components in an attempt to appeal to more people. This gen, every game feels like it needs to be a 20-60 hour Action/Adventure/Open World/RPG. If games don't follow that format, they're probably going to fail and studios will be shuttered. I don't think we've seen the worst yet. I think the only thing that will make the industry course correct is another crash, but the industry may be too big to fail at this point. It'll probably just continue to hemorrhage talent and creativity.
I would say overall that there is more variety today, but that is only because of the birth of indie games. That's were a lot of the truly creative works are coming from.
In these last two months I've played Spider-Man, the typical AAA product, as well as:
- an artsy game about moving around a hole (Donut County)
- a 2 wildly different cinematic sidescrollers (Far: Lone Sails and PLANET ALPHA)
- an comedic adventure game (Flipping Death)
- a Metroidvania (Guacamelee! 2)
- two puzzle platformers (The Rabbit and the Owl and DYO)
This has never been more apparent than it has with Sony recently. Sure we have one-offs like Dreams and Concrete Genie, but most of the hype surrounds the larger, often open world games with far larger scopes than of previous generations. I did love Horizon Zero Dawn. I liked God of War, but also missed the the old style of the games. I platinumed Spider-Man, and enjoyed it, but it didn't really do anything unexpected. After loving the Uncharted trilogy, Uncharted 4 was extremely underwhelming. So for those reasons and more, I'm not all that optimistic about upcoming AAA games like Days Gone and The Last of Us: Part II.
I'd love to see other genres back in the AAA limelight - more 3D platformers, arcades titles in the racing and sports genres, pure arcade titles like Nex Machina, Resogun, and Velocity franchise, hack and slash, action RPGs like Dark Cloud. I'd love to see Sony bring their own indie branch back to put out new games from promising new developers that are equally as great as Journey, The Unfinished Swan, and Sound Shapes.
Until then, I'll continue to focus primarily on indies to give me what I want.
