I ran across a video that makes a very strong argument that 'innovation' in both an established video game series , and new games does not translate into high sales.

What do you think of this ?

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Didnt watch it yet, but the first thing that comes to mind is that if your new innovative game doesnt exist yet, maybe its because no one would like to play that kind of game, theres no market for it.

So to create something innovative can either mean total fail or market exclusivity.

The cry "You don't know what you want" is correct. The vast majority of game players do not know what they want. Often the things they say they want are terrible ideas that are not fun. On forums for games I've helped build people typically complain and ask for features, but they are often ideas we have explored and discovered are generally terrible.

Innovators frequently suffer and die. It usually isn't until the third or fourth or twentieth clone before new concepts are accepted in the marketplace.

Sexy sells. Remake a game people are comfortable with and make it sexy in some way, and people will line up for it. It usually takes several iterations before sexy happens.

I reckon the statement "innovation doesn't sell" is only half of the argument. The other half is that "without innovation none of these games would even exist". This holds true for any time and place - the 80s, 90s, noughties and the current decade alike.

A point in case. When it was first introduced, regenerating health was an innovation. It fundamentally changed the FPS and other genres. It is only the likes of myself whose core gaming age precedes the regenerating health era that begrudge the fact that games have been made too easy these days. While I do maintain that this is true and that attempts at throwbacks such as the 1999 mode in Bioshock Infinite are a joke, that is not to say that regenerating health is not a step forward - it is, just not in a way I would have hoped. Expanding on this, what "Wolfensten: The New Order" did is actually pretty darn clever and, as a matter of fact, happens to be a direct derivative of the regenerating health paradigm. This very same over-simplification has also spawned dozens and hundreds of indie games whose main selling point is unforgiving difficulty (Hotline Miami, Flappy Bird and Super Meat Boy come to mind first - these are true hardcore throwbacks to the times when the player couldn't make a single mistake, because if he did, he was dead*). Hence a change like regenerating health is not a step back. And it's not stagnation. It's a process of trial and error that goes by a different name: evolution. The fact that it is now present in almost every game only testifies that it was a vastly successful innovation.

However.

Innovation, much like evolution, moves at a different pace. As an example, we human beings cannot fully fathom the fact that we evolved from apes (or that birds evolved from reptiles), because it's a process that spans across millions of years and is so gradual that the changes would not be noticeable, even if we took the entire recorded history of civilization as a frame of reference. Nevertheless, if you compare the two stages (ape and man, reptile and bird), they're so vastly different that drawing a direct parallel between them seems like a big stretch.

Games like HL2 (let's be honest - the actual innovation quotient is pretty darn flimsy there; the only new things are physics-related and the extensive use of cut scenes, which I deem a fairly questionable thing in any game (note: more on the gravity gun later)), Bioshock Infinite (again, let's be honest, it's just System Shock with more action) or even a newer example such as Shadow Of Mordor may not be raking in nearly as much dough as the countless rehashes within existing franchises, but in the long run these are going to be the games that are going to push gaming forward and eventually save both the consumer and the industry. The truth here is that many games on that list do not innovate in the truest sense of the word. Portal isn't an innovation in the FPS/puzzle solving genre - it's a combination of small innovative ideas that amount to a thoroughly successful whole, but ultimately it revolves around one big gimmick. It's the same case with the gravity gun. If these were innovations, they would now be in every game. But they aren't. In fact, one thing that HL2 did brilliantly, that now is a part of most games, but has little to do with its main selling point (the gravity gun) is physics. Similarly, there are aspects to Portal and Portal 2 that are far more important as far as the evolution of game design goes than the actual portal gun itself: the storytelling + writing, the voice acting and pacing. The portal gun and the gels are just icing on the cake. They are what make Portal Portal (or Portal 2), but they haven't changed gaming on the whole in the slightest.

Although - what an icing on the cake the portal gun is!

Much like evolution, innovation gets it wrong a thousand times before getting it right once and that is why it is never about one single factor, but a combination of factors. A transition from homo erectus to homo sapiens is rare, although in the gaming world it does happen on a non-astronomical time scale (we get something new that's big every decade). This 1000:1 ration is why the cycle of innovation cannot be compared to the industry in general (whose main source of revenue is releasing game in a given franchise every year). And that's also why games that make the cut cannot alone be hailed as the force of innovation that drives the industry - there are far far far more games that never reach the public's eye that ultimately do the heavy lifting. So in reality the charts that the dude in the OP's video shows are even more skewed than the shown data would have us believe. After all, even the idea for the portal gun (or the gels for that matter) wasn't an original one - what made the game tick was how it was put together.

* the iffy part here is recognizing whether this kind of ruthless difficulty makes sense in the current era. The truth is that unforgiving difficulty has its roots in arcade games whose sole purpose was to make money. And what better way to make money than to kill the player as often and as haphazardly as possible.

Minecraft has sold almost 19 million copies. Thoughts?

Minecraft has sold almost 19 million copies. Thoughts?

Voxel based building - survival game, which came out after many different Lego games - heck "Cubes5" came out in the mid 1990's .

Sexy sells. Remake a game people are comfortable with and make it sexy in some way, and people will line up for it. It usually takes several iterations before sexy happens.

Its like darksiders, they took lots of cool mechanics from other games and put it on theirs, in a very sexy way. Dont know why these games werent hyped thou, I think theyr REALLY good.

So I need to make my game(s) sexually attractive?

Shogun.

That whole YouTube channel is asinine.

Without innovation there would be no advancement whatsoever. When gamers say they want innovation, they mean they're tired of playing the same shit re-skinned for the billionth time. They're not saying they want someone to rub their ass on the keyboard, compile, and ship. A new idea can be good or it can be bad. Saying that new ideas are all bad is just as stupid as saying that they're all good.

Without innovation there would be no advancement whatsoever. When gamers say they want innovation, they mean they're tired of playing the same shit re-skinned for the billionth time.

True to a point - but why do "old" worn out game consepts receive more sales than new and innovative games ?

Mario Party 8 has sold more copies than BOTH Portal games combined !