Gaming is dead/Long live gaming.

[Pete for President]

All these big franchises started off as originals at some point, after all.

That is indeed very true and in a perfect world this alone should be motivation enough for companies to take a chance. However, as you said, they don't really need to as the company is already making money as it is. And with money as the goal there seems to be little to no value given for a memorable and enriching experience.

Flower and Limbo are two of the best games ever crafted and their beauty and perfection can be attributed almost entirely to their simplicity. Thatgamingcompany, the company behind Flower and Flow and the upcoming Journey for which I'm very excited, has a good philosophy for developing games, which in short views video games in the artistic sense of communicating something experiential and existential to the audience.

These are indeed exceptions of what's mentioned above and Thatgamingcompany's philosophy is lovely. Same goes for team ICO who so far only made original, memorable, enriching experiences.

However, I think a better business strategy is to go ahead and make your sequels, but use the revenue from those to fund more original projects.

Agreed. I wish there were more developers who put this to practice. Portal emerged from such tactic, if I recall correctly.

If I had a choice between challenge and a good story, I'd pick good story every time.

I'm not sure whether these two are actually a case of 'either one or the other'. Combining exploration and a good story on the other hand seems to be very rare.

That being said, though, there's room for all kinds of video games in the modern market. I don't agree that the things OP mentioned necessarily mean games are being dumbed down. Instead perhaps the more complicated the games get the more developers find it necessary to make them easy to access initially but with steeper roads to climb to reach mastery.

I can imagine the developers wanting to make their more complicated games easier to access, but the steeper roads to climb are exactly what I think is missing from most games. In a lot of games there is no mastery. To me, mastery is overcoming a challenge by learning and improving. I believe that curve does actually get dumbed down in a large number of games.

We all choose to play games. Nobody forces any game on us. Therefore it is our responsibility, not theirs (the developers), to make the right decisions as to whether or not to buy a game, or how we express ourselves to the developers as a community of consumers and players after the fact. ... Also, there are plenty of games that are freaking hard as hell. You're not looking hard enough.

Point taken. That may indeed be the case. Maybe I'm just a little frustrated that games to my liking are no longer the standard.

Video games are a visual medium. We interact with them, first and foremost, visually.

I don't agree. We interact with the in game environment not only with our senses (which goes beyond visuals only, like sound and the touch of a controller), but mostly with our mind. We connect the links to complete a certain task not with our eyes, but by thinking.

Underground is not a synonym for good.

You're right, I think I may have to rewrite that statement. Although I do believe underground does represent a different motivation for actually making a game compared to triple A developers. Hence innovation and originality is mostly found here, but like you say, that doesn't guarantee it's good.

In my personal opinion, most of the problems OP mentioned aren't the developers' faults at all, but the consumers. The gamers. And it's not really the gamers' faults, it's the system. And the system is really just a byproduct of humanity's social evolution, which is just a byproduct of its biological evolution which is just a byproduct of nature.

Still trying to wrap my around this, but I believe this may be a bit out of scope for this discussion.

Importing player decisions into Mass Effect 2 made it fun to revisit Mass Effect over and over again, and I had such a blast making the WORST IMPORT EVER in preparation for Mass Effect 3 coming out next year. Everybody is dead but Shepard and Joker and I totally ruined everything ever at every opportunity. It's going to be great to contrast it with my "perfect" file.

Unfortunately I haven't played the ME series, mainly because I'm on PS3 and we're missing the first one, but the concept of continuing with imports from previous games adds a lot of value to the sequel.


Edit: props to everyone who takes the time to follow this discussion!