I disagree with this. I think we are in a game renaissance right now with many great games being released all the time.

What I agree does suck are Triple A games. Why do they suck? Well, they cost a lot of money to make. You need a team of dozens of people working over a long period of time along with lots of marketing. Millions and tens of millions of dollars can easily go into a modern AAA game.

So when you have millions of dollars of investor money behind you- you’re not going to take many risks. You’re going to be as conservative and formulaic as possible so that you can better predict what you will bring in through revenue. This is why there’s a new Call of Duty, FIFA, and Assassin’s Creed every single year. And they’re all virtually the same game with slight changes.

In my opinion if you want to see actual innovation and creativity, you (generally) have to look outside of these types of games. Not even necessarily niche indie games, but smaller scale developers. They don’t have nearly as much overhead and they tend to have passionate individuals with a vision. This gives them more flexibility.

So as a general rule of thumb, you’ll find more ambitious games coming from smaller developers. And with ambition comes both great successes and failures. But the cream rises to the top.