Not refining franchises and genres. Instead entire franchises have been taken into whole new genres or abandoned because they aren’t making CoD numbers.
Example:
Ninja Gaiden. It’s only entry that’s legit cheeks is the OG Ninja Gaiden 3.
Team Ninja then varies off into Nioh, Wo Long, Stranger of Paradise, and now Ronin. Mind you each game is good, some better than others. But none of them are NG. A franchise to this day heralded as the BEST of the character action genre.
Look at Gears of War. Oh sorry, it didn’t make Fortnite dollars. Guess we will ignore it for a while console generation.
Oh final fantasy should be a third person action game now, not turn based. Yet a turn based game like BG3 goes onto sell a truck load.
Too many developers chasing others success instead of finding their own success and expanding on it.
There was definitely a while there where you did need to chase MP or 100+ hours in a game, it needed open world, it needed top end graphics etc. Now that’s all settled and above all else people just want a cohesive gameplay loop and not be nickel and dimed, or have their time wasted.
I would kill for a new ninja gaiden. A traditional turn based FF. A new Socom focused on just fun like socom 2.