[raincole]

> You cannot reduce them to a magic and infinitely-repeatable formula

The formula is:

> blockbuster movies every year, 20+ years of superhero movies just rehashing old IP, endless sequelss, annual Call of Duty releases, FIFA/Madden annual micro-transaction hell and so on

These are very successful businesses. You might not like them as a gamer, but I don't know why you said it like they're some failures. They're not OpenAI but clearly are printing money. From an investor's point of view that's what matters.

[Gigachad]

Games in particular do not have to be that novel. People are still playing chess which hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. There is plenty of money to be made in just remaking the same concept but for the latest hardware with the latest technology.

[jmyeet]

The counter argument for this is emulators. An extraordinary amount of effort is made by people, largely for free, to play otherwise dead games from dead platforms.

Reskins of games with flashier graphics has some demand but game studios largely don’t do this. New content is created for the annual CoD game rather than simply reskinning the old game, remasters notwithstanding.

[Gigachad]

The base concept of CoD is the same each time though. If you liked the last one, you'll likely like the next one. It's predictable which means you can pour a lot more money in to it since you know there is a customer base for it.

[krageon]

The fact that they are printing money doesn't make them a success. We aren't earning anything based on this money printing. We're getting a qualitatively worse product for more money, which we accept because in a lot of ways we've been conditioned to believe there isn't any other way.

I feel like you understand they're not a success, because you recognise that "you might not like them as a gamer". This is the target audience.