Instead it refers to something that the intended consumer has no, or little, reference for.
I’d argue that’s novelty, not originality, though you may be right in that it’s what was meant. I’d still say that’s not the critical piece in a successful game. Passion and care matter much more, imo.
“Originality” is overvalued. Yes, it’s an important aspect, but even near-clones can be great. Just look at Stardew Valley vs Harvest Moon.
Imo, the real key to making a great game (along with skill) is heart/care. If a dev is only making a game to make bank, it’s going to come through. And when a game is made with care and attention, that comes through in spades. All of these games have creators that clearly care about the game itself and, while they are being rewarded for their efforts, that wasn’t and isn’t their primary drive in developing or maintaining the games.
This is why a lot of sites demand an account log in if the user disables cookies (or at least they did for a while). They need those cookies to link the activity to a user, and since they can’t do that secretly anymore, they just force the issue with a user account the user “chooses” to make.
“Out of the blue”. They were gobbling up studios as nothing more than assets. Any “good” that came of that process was purely incidental and this sandbag dumping when they started to sink was inevitable.
That’s true (to be even more precise, the GTA metric is also for the franchise…which GTAV makes up $8.5 billion of >.>). How about Candy Crush at $20 billion?
Minecraft is the highest selling game (beating out GTA V by 110 million units sold source), but it’s not the most profitable. GTA does have it beat there ($9.9 billion vs $3.3 billion). Though CoD has them both beat at $31 billion (source).
In what way did a hyper-conglomerate buying up every studio they could for their own profit seem to indicate it would usher in “a new age of games”? It was always going to end like this.