Over the last few decades, a number of video game genres have come in and out of fashion repeatedly: turn-based strategy games, fightings games, RPGs, etc. There seems to be a pattern to this process.
- Birth: An amazing new game comes out, creating a whole new genre. It’s simple and clever and everybody loves it.
- Sophistication: Different teams create games in this genre, adding new features to differentiate their game. The new features make the games broader and deeper and at first they don’t make the games much more complicated.
- Complexification: Competition increases, forcing teams to add more and more stuff in their games. The new features please the fans of the genre who have played those games since the birth of the genre, but raising complexity makes it harder for new players to join the fun.
- Death: Old fans of the genre start playing other games, while very few new players try the overly complicated genre. The number of players drops and publishers don’t dare create new titles in the genre. Some established franchises can do somewhat good business, but otherwise the genre shows few signs of life.
- Rebirth: An amazing new game comes out, reinventing the genre. It refreshes tired gameplay by putting a new twist on it, bringing it to a whole new audience. The new game is simple and clever and everybody loves it. And competitors start figuring out what they can add to the genre…
Genres can stay in each stage for years, even decades. Western-style RPGs were born very early in the history of video games. They started very simple, but grew more and more complicated until they dropped in popularity. It took Diablo, Fallout and Baldur’s Gate to bring them back to popularity with a new point of view and a new way of playing (top-down point and click instead of first-person turn-based).
A number of modern games seem to be getting far into this process. FPSs are getting more complicated rather than more sophisticated. They got a new life by being introduced to console players, but even then I believe they’re getting into the “complexification” stage. RTSs have long reached the complexification stage and are going toward death. A few years ago you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting a RTS, now I can’t name a single one that came out in 2007. Turn-based strategy games may be having a small rebirth on handhelds: Advance Wars is doing great on the DS and the PSP has many Japanese Tactical RPGs.