Avogadro6: Honestly I'm not really fond of today's PC market - except for the sales. Both the industry and the playerbase have lost much of their ingenuity, technology keeps advancing but gameplay is stale.
I don't like how all the multi-million titles are getting more and more streamlined (and with that I do NOT mean dumbed down, that's a whole another matter) and indies are where to look at for innovation - they have the ideas, but not the resources. It's almost as if every major publisher were trying to fit through the same door at the same time, to cater the same audience, but with almost the same offer.
At least before things were more balanced, or so I remember.
Here's my theory: As graphics become more and more advanced, games require more and more money to produce. Now, unless you're looking to get in on the indie market, you can't just put together a game and try to publish it, because if you want something that's going to run to modern graphical standards, you're looking at an enormous capital investment. That's where the publishers come in. They help pay for the game's costs, so it can happen. But, that's a lot of money, and they don't want to be just throwing that away, so they want something that's guaranteed to sell well. And what's the closest we can get to a guarantee that something will sell well? Emulating something that's already a top-seller.
Each new Call of Duty or Battlefield game has got to be more or less like the last one because they've invested too much money into it to see it flop over some innovations that people didn't like.
