Literally, after five years of the conventional wisdom being that only established franchises and sequels could exist in the games market, someone finally got the idea that maybe, just maybe, the people are tired of the same old, same old (found via Kotaku). Of course, reading the article, it looks like Next Gen has just chosen to play up a throwaway line from the analyst and make it the headline.

That doesn’t make it not true, though. The games I’ve seen getting buzz are Guitar Hero, D&D Online, the Movies, Shadow of the Colossus and Civ IV. Only one of those is a sequel, and the other four are at least TRYING new things (although whether they’re succeeding undubitably will spark healthy debate on their own). Meanwhile, no one talking about games in the communities I lurk in has even pointed out that Soul Caliber 3 has hit shelves, much less asked if it’s any good.

To be honest, the games industry has always had a skewed idea of sequelitis. The conventional wisdom is that gaming is the only media genre where sequels routinely outperform their predecessors – movies, for example, pretty much assume it’s all downhill from the original. A record-busting blockbuster may become Straight to Video once you reach sequel number III or IV.

Games, on the other hand, have often historically sold more when the sequel ships. Ironically, piracy probably plays a pretty big reason why. $50 bucks is a big investment, especially in a hobby as hit-and-miss as video gaming, so people may rent or pirate v 1.0 of any given game. When the sequel comes out, if they liked the first, their positive experiences with the first make it more likely they’ll straight out buy the second when it comes out.

So what the money guys see is a sales curve that goes straight up, but what they miss is that that’s a curve with two points of data. There is a ceiling on that curve that will get hit pretty fast, and things will level off, if not start to drop as the gameplay becomes more ‘been there, done that’ (see Soul Caliber). Even worse, it only takes a couple of bad releases to strangle the goose dropping the golden goods (see Tomb Raider).

Having strong brands that you can sequel is good, and an important part of every business strategy in the games market. But recent years, where everything that did well was a sequel, was an ebb in an ebb and flow that will be constant throughout the industry’s life cycle. Players constantly crave new types of interactive experiences, and ultimately, relying solely on sequels does not scratch that itch.

Original comments thread is here.