[...] creatividad en la industria. De los 17 juegos que listan, 15 son secuelas, de acuerdo al sitio de Ralph Koster. Vía el blog de [...]

Should Harry Potter have been just 1 book, Star Wars just 1 film, Diablo just one game? Should people stop playing tennis and find a new sport after a set period because otherwise they don’t participate in innovating?

We stick with the same because we enjoy it, there is nothing wrong with that. Let there be Starcraft 12 and The Sims 8 if people enjoy themselves with it that long. EA’s sport series goes through annual releases. Nothing wrong with that as long as people like it.

If the topic must be innovation, it often comes in odd turns. The original one hardly gets noticed or tractions and only later iterations do get the visibility and are hailed as landmark innovations.

Who remembers the first RTS ever and not the first RTS they played? Was Wolfenstein or Doom your innovation towards FPS or something else? Did The Sims create the casual simulation based craze or is that as old as Civilization, Sim City, Little Computer People or even MULE? Why are we seeing newer and newer flight simulators, when I played my first one in the 80s? Was the MMO breakthrough DikuMud or WoW or something else? And how is Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero all that different in concept from the late 70s Simon? Looking at Spores I am reminded of The Sims, Creatures, Viva Pinata and more… is it a sequel in spirit of any of those? And isn’t little big planet also falling into a similar category maybe with just a dab more of “build your village” ala Anno, Settlers, Sim City, Black & White etc…

Iteration and improvement on a core concept is innovation too, though it may not be as flashy. Often these iterations prepare the possibility of innovation. FPS simply became possible technically, just as MMOs became possible. Gesture based gaming ala Wii was in the air for years among academics at least who studied alternative ways of control and input long before we see it now as commodity.

A more well-known example would be… Warcraft 3, anyone?

I didn’t find Warcraft 3 to be particularly innovative for its time. It had upgraded 3D graphics, but that had already been done by lots of other games, going back to Total Annihilation in ’97. The added RPG element was fairly superficial, and had also been done by other games a long time before (Warlords Battlecry, ’99).

Star Control II (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/), on the other hand, took a strategy game and turned it into a space adventure game, with the only similarity remaining with the old engine being the ship-to-ship battles.

A more well-known example would be… Warcraft 3, anyone?

The games industry has a lot more in common with the music business than with Hollywood. Sequels aren’t horrible. The Beatles released many, many sequels.

I feel this analogy is a hard sell. Could you elaborate a bit more on where you find similarities and where you feel the limitations of the analogy are?

Specifically, I’m trying to imagine how you could not produce a sequel when you produce a new album. Do you have to change up the group? Switch genres? Innovate the genre?

Maybe I can also add that the list would change up a bit if we divided it by who’s a major innovator in the industry vs who’s simply depending on their franchise. Yeah, the franchises exist, but a lot of them exist because they actually do something interesting, and they’re just continuing on that.

Not like I wouldn’t like a little more competition, and maybe I want uncertainty so we could find more time to experiment and find new things that work…

Now, that being said, don’t read too much into the article. It’s easier for writers like this to point backward at innovation (Portal, Flow, etc) than forward. Pointing forward requires awareness, which is only being worked for the big titles, so the last two on the list are ones that pubs have made big bets on and are among their riskier bets.

I have no doubt that this time next year, the same writer could point backward at a title from ’08 and say “oh yeah, I didn’t know about THAT game when I made the list”.

However, I haven’t had a chance to play any of the games on the list yet, and I’m fed up of being told how creative and different the games this year are compared to last year (and the AI! this year it REALLY IS intelligent!). It hasn’t been the case so far, and I doubt it will be now.