The gaming industry is, well, an industry. In any business or industry, sales are important. The problem with industries is that they often stagnate and rarely innovate. This happens in the gaming industry quite often. A game that tries something new and becomes incredibly popular. For the next few years, every game attempts to emulate it. This is particularly notable in the triple A industry where millions of dollars are on the line if a game fails. No matter how much a game is adored by fans, publishers are interested in numbers. It’s very rare that a game bombs and receives a sequel. Entire game series have been scrapped due to the failure of a single installment.

This leaves both developers and gamers in an uncomfortable situation. For developers, the artistic integrity of their vision can be sacrificed in varying ways. A game may have been a passion project, but because the publishers scrapped it, the series will not see any DLC or expansion packs, let alone a sequel. The developers are also forced to add or remove features from a game to appeal to the same market that bought another game. This includes actions such as removing most of the story segments from Destiny or forcing multiplayer onto Watch_Dogs. And, more than anything, it can lead to publishers requesting a game in an already over-saturated market. Lawbreakers is a good example of this developing a game where there is already a highly saturated market for it. Worse than any of the above issues is having to produce the same game on a yearly basis like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed.

On the gamer’s end, this leads to apathy. Gamers get bored of having to choose between two different versions of the same game. Games will always be compared to one another, so if too many games on the market are similar, most players will simply opt out of buying any of them. If a game doesn’t do enough to separate itself from the crowd, it’s doomed to fail. At the height of MOBA popularity, the only games that continued to thrive were Smite, DOTA 2, and League of Legends. Most others are now barely scraping by or cancelled altogether. Casual gamers will continue to buy the most popular version of whatever the flavor of the month is, but only for so long. The end result is hardcore gamers becoming jaded and casual gamers losing the ability to see the difference between games.