Since it kicked off in the fall of 2020, the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S generation has largely been defined by sequels, remasters, and remakes. Great original games have emerged, but mostly in the independent space. Big developers — the ones making flagship titles for the major consoles — have relied on sticking to familiar territory.

For a while, the PS5’s sole exclusive title (aside from the pack-in game Astro’s Playroom) was Demon’s Souls, a shiny new remake of a 2009 cult hit. And when we think of Sony's stable of developers, they follow the same track.

Santa Monica Studios made God of War Ragnarok, a ‘more is more’ sequel to its 2018 reboot. Insomniac has released a Ratchet & Clank sequel and two Spider-Man sequels (with, per last year's leak, more Marvel-related spin-offs on the way). Guerilla Games went from franchise to franchise, trading in the long-in-the-tooth Killzone series for Horizon, which it has now stuck with for two mainline games and a VR title.

Naughty Dog, the beloved developer of Uncharted and The Last of Us, has released three games on the PS5 — all remasters. I’ve played them all, and had a good time. But this developer used to introduce a new series each console generation. It moved on from Crash Bandicoot to Jak and Daxter when the PS2 came out, then onto Uncharted and The Last of Us on the PS3, and now has stuck to those two franchises across three generations. Naughty Dog was a forward thinking studio, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Rocksteady spent nine years out of the spotlight, only to return with another game set in the same universe as its previous three games, but with live-service nonsense suffusing every aspect of the game — including its botched early access launch this week. It’s the same path WB Games Montréal followed two years earlier, releasing a new Batman game (largely without Batman) with live-service elements that irritated fans, and watching as it received critical and commercial shrugs.

This resistance to doing new things makes sense when you consider how some of the only big original titles to launch this generation were received. Starfield, marketed as Bethesda’s first new IP in 30 years, did well at launch but has quickly come to be seen as a failure. It missed out on a game of the year nomination at The Game Awards, and on Steam, its All-Time user reviews are now Mixed, with Recent reviews Mostly Negative. I didn’t play much of the game because I needed to make room on my PC, but after experiencing its checklist-y approach to space travel, I understand where the negativity is coming from.

Bethesda is headed back to a familiar franchise with its next revealed game, The Elder Scrolls 6, which was announced all the way back in 2018.

Volition, similarly, took a break from its reliable Saints Row franchise to make 2017’s Agents of Mayhem, which failed. And, when it returned to Saints Row with 2022’s reboot, it wasn't so reliable anymore. It flopped hard, and the studio closed. Bend Studio, a minor league Sony studio that got to move up to the majors, similarly received a critical bruising when it launched Days Gone at the end of the last console generation (thought it seems to have sold fairly well). Even when a studio takes a risk that creatively pays off, like Tango Gameworks' pivot from horror to rhythm action with Hi-Fi Rush, the sales aren't there to back it up.

There is risk involved in exploring new frontiers, especially now that games take four or five years to develop instead of one or two. Naughty Dog's pivot away from new franchises happened around the same time that development cycles became hellaciously long, and other studios have the same dangers to consider. You may spend five years making an original game, only for it to launch to poor sales. And when studios can close after one such failure, it's easy to understand prioritizing survivability over creative exploration.

But there are risks in playing it safe, too. A developer can lose what makes it special if it spends too much time attempting to recapture past glories. After a game-as-a-service misfire, it seems that may be the path that BioWare is on, bleeding talent as it promises new entries in two old series, while a hungrier studio finds Game of the Year success by working in the party-based, romance-focused niche it carved decades earlier. You can rely on old successes for too long, playing the hits until the audience is tired of hearing them. As we look ahead to the second half of this generation, I hope that we see more original games that are alive with the creative spirit of the team that made them, and I hope we see them more often than every five years.

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Current Development Trends Will Make Most Sequels Into Lega-Sequels

More time will pass between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 than between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace.

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