Whenever a big budget title enters the first phases of development it has to go through a great deal of scrutiny.  It needs to prove before square one that it will make back the tens of millions of dollars its going to cost to make (movies and TV are guilty of this too).  The developer has to use things like Metacritc scores and game sales to prove saleability to publishers or financiers in order to get the funding they need to make the game.  Understandably publishers and money people are in the business of spending money to make money and don’t want to take risks on anything they don’t think can make a profit for them.  To be palatable for consideration, games frequently have to be boiled down to “it’s like Bioshock in space”, or “think Farmville with guns”, or some other mash-up of proven successful titles.  This practice of circling around established ideas to create the new content of tomorrow ultimately suffocates creativity at its heart.  It inadvertently paints the picture that if something hasn’t been done before it can’t be done, or if it’s been done badly then the genre is a failure.  Just because a genre hasn’t been well represented before, or because an idea hasn’t been attempted, doesn’t mean the idea can’t be a hit when made correctly.  Yet if a game concept strays too far from the established examples provable through review scores and sales numbers, it frequently makes the game prohibitively difficult to fund even if the ideas fit the game design perfectly.  There’s no way around it, but the good games you love will naturally and inadvertently destroy creativity for games to come.

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