If there’s one common complaint about the current state of games that’s getting harder to ignore, it’s all these games look the same. It’s an issue that’s gotten so noticeable that even longtime industry veterans like Hideo Kojima are calling it out in a recent interview promoting Death Stranding 2. He bluntly stated that he felt so much of the stuff shown during the Summer Games Fest looked the same, going so far as to say that “Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same.”
I wish that I could flat out say that he’s wrong. But looking at the list of games at the event, I can see what he means. Mortal Shell II, CODE VEIN II, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Chrono Odyssey, Lies of P: Overture, The First Descendant, WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, and stuff like the new Resident Evil and Dying Light: The Beast. Even the new 007 game! While I’m not knocking what any of these games look like, they don’t look that different from what we’ve come to expect from these types of games.
Where is all the weird stuff, the things that really push the boundaries of the medium to new and exciting places? It feels like the industry is kind of in a rut these days and there are a lot of reasons for that.
Playing It Safe: Templates and Trends
Hi folks, it’s Zaid and today on Aura Riot, let’s ask the question, do all recent games look the same?
So to start off, probably one of the bigger aspects of this is the fact that most major games tend to follow the same templates. They tend to have similar control schemes and while there are games that stand out and do something different, but when it happens, it’s the exception rather than the rule.
In 2025, it looks like most AAA developers are playing it really safe and they have been for a while now, which isn’t necessarily bad, I want to quickly say here. If you like soulslike, if you like open worlds and military-themed FPS games, and I do like those things, it’s not bad. To have a bunch of very high quality versions of these things is not a terrible thing, but it is starting to feel like the industry is in desperate need of some new ideas.
The Cost of Playing It Safe
The desire to play it safe and repeat someone else’s successes or previous successes in the name of whatever guy runs the company, Mr. Finance or whatever, it’s so bad that mobile gaming giant Tencent is getting in trouble for allegedly ripping Sony off. Normally, I’d say it’s a little overblown. I really don’t think you can exactly rip off a game or a genre or anything like that ’cause that’s kind of how genres happen in gaming.
Can you imagine if Nintendo got litigious over the idea of a platform game after Mario’s success? Yeah, it would’ve ruined gaming, but like just to be clear, it is possible to rip off a game. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the LIGHT OF MOTIRAM trailer, but Sony might have a case.
Now, I can argue with you over whether it matters or not. If ripping off games is really the worst thing in the world, I would probably not be on Sony’s side. Well, Falcon is no friend to intellectual property law, let’s say. But in terms of what’s on the books, it’s possible.
Safe Bets and Shrinking Risks
But anyway, all the big boys are looking very timid lately. I mean, it wasn’t always the case, but even Sony’s recent output has been as safe as possible, sticking with cinematic action games and open world set in long running franchises. Even something like Astro Bot which could be conceived as something new is really just an extremely polished and well-made take on an otherwise traditional platform.
Again, what I’m saying isn’t automatically bad. Astro Bot is a wonderful game, but rewind 30 years and the game Sony was putting out were crazy different. Like when PlayStation 1 first launch, it was a deluge of creativity. Sony put out a ton of weird stuff like Jumping Flash! and Twisted Metal. In 1996, we got underwater exploration games like Aquanaut’s Holiday in the game that’s often considered the first true rhythm game, PaRappa the Rapper.
All throughout the PlayStation 1 and 2 era, Sony was putting out all kinds of varied and interesting games. Not all of them worked. A lot of them were pretty rough, but they were making legitimately interesting games that nobody would confuse with one another.
The Cost of Realism and Consolidation
The comparison isn’t really fair though because the industry is super different than it was. Graphics technology has improved leaps and bounds, which has led to skyrocketing development costs and lots of increased labor. Games used to be cranked out in a year or two tops. Now, wow can they take longer. GTA 6 has been development for at least six years. It’s also costing what some are estimating to be more than a billion dollars.
This is a special case, of course, but it’s a general trend across the board for the industry. Players want the most visually impressive games on their next generation consoles and power user PCs, but making those games is as expensive as you can imagine, requires massive teams working for years to make all that stuff happen.
The rising cost of development mean games need to appeal to the largest audience possible. So a lot of the time, developers are just playing it safe. They replicate what worked in the past and try to appeal to the core audience. They homogenize the controls and the mechanics and they make it easy for players to get into a game and start playing, which means they don’t deviate too much from what people expect.
The Photorealism Trap
Again, not necessarily bad. Graphics getting better also means that just by the nature of technology, more games have a slightly more realistic, and therefore more similar look to them, which is just inevitable when people are trying to create the most graphically impressive thing possible.
A lot of people are chasing that photorealism dragon, which I mean, reality can only look like reality. And the closer you get to it, the more, well, all these games kind of run together. Even when they look wildly different because gritty realism is a style and like Quentin Tarantino doesn’t make stuff that isn’t reality, it’s reality. But, I mean, we’re in a bit of an era where style is not quite the thing people are going for.
You can start to understand why people are complaining about this. All the things that I said, not necessarily bad per se, but when we’re trending away from intentional style and trending towards chasing essentially impressive visuals specifically via realism, it becomes samey, dull even.
Engines, Assets, and the Same Starting Point
The consolidation of video game engines also contributes to this. Other than the few big names that have their own proprietary engines, a lot of developers are using Unreal Engine 5 and that puts them all in a very similar starting point.
Now, Unreal doesn’t automatically make your game generic because, to be frank, the engine shouldn’t be the thing that determines what your style is. And there are plenty of examples recently of Unreal Engine 5 games with their own unique style. Like I wouldn’t have assumed Jusant was Unreal Engine 5, but somebody told me it was and I was like, “Damn, nice!”
Using the Engine doesn’t make a game generic, but like I said, it does put you in the same starting point as everyone else who’s using Unreal Engine 5. And they also have an asset store that, to be frank, people use. Certain assets really start to stand out after a while. And also games that rely on the MetaHuman Creator, like it’s cool that smaller games can have more realistic human models in them, but wow do they start looking the same because MetaHuman is just literally trying to be a realistic human.
The Cycle of Sameness
Kojima’s complaint about Summer Games Fest wasn’t just that visually, the games looked the same, but also all you’re doing is fighting giant aliens or medieval monsters. Go back 15 years and tell me the soulslike would be so ubiquitous that Kojima would be complaining about them and I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
The industry tends to go through cycles and one of the areas of that cycle is everything looks the same. Now what happens is something does well, everyone chases that, tries to recreate it, and they all end up making the same damn thing. And then, everything becomes the same. And then, something stands out from the pack, looks different than everything else and is still good, it becomes successful, and then everybody chases that.
This has been rinsed and repeated many times at this point and it’s not really as bad as laying it out simply it makes it sound. But after something successful comes out, we’re gonna get a bunch of follow-the-leader copycats. It’s how it works.
New Blood and Global Shifts
The ’90s was mascot platformers. In the 2000s and 2010s, his first person military shooters and open world games. Somehow in the current moment, it’s soulslikes, which is, I mean it’s unlikely, but after the massive success of Elden Ring, everybody wants a piece of that pie and we are getting a deluge of those things.
They do have their differences and there are reasons to play a lot of these games. Like certainly, I’m not going to complain about Khazan, I just did a Before You Buy on WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, where I very positively talked about the game. I think it’s a game. I think it’s enjoyable. I think it’s worth playing due to the quality of it. And at the same time, it’s kind of part of this. And while I have to give credit where credit is due, that doesn’t mean Kojima is wrong.
Global Shifts and Shrinking Output
There have been a lot of games fighting giant medieval monsters in the past few years. Now their place of origin, we’ve seen some new players on the block with Chinese developers, South Korean developers moving into the core games industry and the games that are coming from them are primarily soulslike, which speaks to changing demographics in the games industry overall.
I don’t know, we’re in a really weird place with video games in 2025 and it’s hard to tell exactly where we’re going to go from here. The Old Guard publishers are really struggling and, in response, they’re taking fewer and fewer risks with their games. They’re also just putting out less games in general like Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Take-Two. The volume of games from all these guys has shrunk drastically this generation.
And a lot of their attempts to make what they thought were safe games have flopped. Like Ubisoft’s ill-fated Star Wars and Avatar game, which I don’t really know why they thought Avatar was safe. There is no Avatar fandom. There’s no real built-in audience. It’s just like, “I will follow Avatar wherever it is. I don’t care!” No, I mean Avatar is a big event film. People go see it because it’s crazy looking. And then, they forget about it. It’s like a theme park.
And ultimately, neither of those games are bad. The Avatar 1 is actually a pretty good game right out of the box and the Star Wars game has become better since launch, but they’re both pretty far from being innovative.
Beyond Mechanics: A New Era of Expression
You can actually see a kind of similar observation coming from Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda. He basically said, “The age of gameplay mechanics has already passed,” and he was actually saying it as a compliment to the new game from Keita Takahashi, the director of Katamari Damacy.
What he was mostly saying is like, you have games that can do a lot of different things that we’ve already come up with. And now, it’s basically, what do you want to do with that? In a lot of cases, that means different narratives of storytelling and interactive experiences. What can we create within the confines of the things we’ve created?
That’s not like a damning attack on the thing we’ve been talking about this whole time, but it’s kind of the same thing we’ve been talking about this whole time. And I would go as far to say, although yes, all the big budget game trailers can kind of blend together at Summer Games Fest. But ultimately, no, modern games don’t all look the same.
The Rise of the Weird and Wonderful
Up until this point, we have been talking about the big budget AAA developers, the large companies that Kojima was complaining about. But to be frank, there are a lot of weird and interesting titles on the horizon, like the cartoon boomer shooter MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, the puppet boxing game called Felt That: Boxing, these are the types of things that would never get highlighted 10 years ago, but they have gotten a pretty fair amount of attention.
And it’s probably that we’re nearing the new beginning of that cycle we mentioned earlier, which is good for gamers. Because if you look at the entire industry, there’s actually a ton of experimentation and unique ideas getting thrown around. In some ways, it’s a more creative and vibrant industry than it’s ever been.
Innovation Is Everywhere
But even if you’re focused on the biggest games that have been released, there have been some interesting titles from the last year. Sure, the big companies are playing it safe and all that, but the newer and the evolving studios are doing something different and getting rewarded for it.
There’s games like Clair Obscur, Blueprints, Split Fiction, which was published by EA, no less. There’s Kingdom Come II. Hell, even Nintendo is doing something innovative with an old formula with Donkey Kong Bananza. Nobody would look at these games and say they all looked the same and all these games came out during the last year and were all successful.
Clair Obscur in particular was an unexpected smash hit and while it was inspired by old school turn-based RPGs, there’s a lot about it that’s really unique.
The Indie Avalanche
The rise of the indie in the last 15 or so years has slowly but surely upended the entire gaming landscape. If anything, games are actually more varied than ever before. There’s actually too many games being made for anybody to play all of them. There’s so many ideas and we’re at the point where a lot of great games get ignored because they’re kind of buried under the sheer glut of the amount of games that come out daily.
And I’m not saying all these games are totally unique either. A lot of the indie space is occupied by games with borrowed ideas or reused visual language, maybe even more so than the big games industry, but the volume of games getting made now is much greater than it used to be. And even if a smaller percent of it is original, there’s still more original stuff being released than ever before.
Like, there were about 19,000 games released in 2024 to Steam. Back in 1995, not even talking about like one sales platform, we’re talking about all platforms, 834 games were released in total. I mean, I’ll go ahead and say this, you’re never gonna play 834 games in a year either.
Picking and Choosing in the Modern Landscape
Like, we have to carefully pick and choose what we’re actually gonna spend time on here because, honestly, you could easily waste all of your time on a lot of different games that make no sense to talk about in a giant massive public square, the platform that we’ve amassed over the years here on Gameranx.
And about, I mean 80% of the games released on Steam are junk that nobody’s actually played, but that still leaves about 3,800 games that are somewhat noteworthy coming out on just Steam. And as I said, 834 is too much and Steam alone dwarfs the yearly game release numbers before digital storefronts where I think. It used to be you’d go on for weeks, if not years, until something good would come out.
And I’m talking here as a power use, somebody who played and enjoyed most of the major game releases that we can keep of as human beings. But now, you can go hardly one week without something new and notable coming out. And while a lot of these games aren’t exactly the most innovative, one thing you can’t say is they all look the same.
Kojima’s Outsider Perspective
I think Kojima’s self-admitted claim that he’s not actually much of a gamer is made clear by his comments. He’s a bit of an outsider in the games industry and he doesn’t engage much with it anymore. So he sees a bunch of trailers for games that, I admit, do run together and he just throws out a comment saying all games look the same.
I think Kojima’s outsider status is a big reason why his games are interesting though. They just kind of do their own thing and have unusual priorities and cinematic ambitions that are separate from the average games developer. So fair, I mean let the guy cook, but I think that’s actually another reason why a lot of the bigger AAA games these days could be considered the same.
And that’s because so many of the people on the staffs making these games are people who grew up playing them. In some ways, the lunatics are running the asylum. Instead of people coming in who have no preconceived notions about what a game should be, games are getting made by people who have lists of things that they can literally check off to say, “Oh, we’re doing gaming right,” Which is not how you make good art.
The Role of Comfort and Convention
And to be fair, not everything has to be good art. People want to play the stuff they like. A lot of the time, gaming, like any other art form, can be comfort food. It’s not always designed to push the boundaries of game design or challenge our notions of what a game even is. It’s just a game designed to be fun.
It’s 2025 and the Wild West of the games industry is long over. Gaming is not a blank slate where anything goes. There’s codified conventions that developers are expected to follow. There are best practices and general consensus about what is considered good and bad game design.
Games were weird and wild back in the day, but it’s also easy to forget how bad some of them could be. Like a lot of games suck, most even sucked. And some of them were not even beatable because they contained some kind of massive flaw. There’s literally games that came out on cartridges that had a game breaking bug that prevented people from beating them.
While that happens, now you can fix it. You don’t have to release a new cart and like execute on that warranty in case anybody gets litigious. And while I’m not sure that I would say the ratio is better, but the volume of decent games is higher now, even if we’re going purely off the fact that the volume of games itself is much higher, the percentage of good games might be a little bit lower. But overall, there’s way more good games that exist.
Final Thoughts: Yes and No
As much as we lament the loss of weird first-party nonsense, like I don’t know, Tail of the Sun, there’s a reason why games like that don’t get made so much anymore. It’s not because of rising development costs. It’s because the game wasn’t really that good.
That experimental period of the games industry was bursting with creativity and uniqueness. But so many of those games really sucked. And it’s not like the early PS1 days was how things always were. The NES was an endless sea of derivative garbage. Actually the home of many a cart with gameplay breaking bugs that prevented people from actually beating the game.
So… Do All Games Look the Same?
So to address the overall question, are all modern games the same? Are they all looking the same? Do they all play the same?
Well, yes and no. I’d be lying if I said a lot of modern games don’t look the same. There are undeniably a lot of games coming out that have similar mechanic systems, visuals, and they’re all clearly inspired by the same things. When they’re not, that they’re just long running franchises that have refused to innovate. With stuff like Call of Duty, you have no incentive to do that ’cause these games still make money hand over fist.
But on the flip side, the industry’s so much bigger than it used to be that it practically doesn’t matter. We’re getting so many more games and so many different genres that are, I mean, in a lot of cases, overshadowing the major publishers.
I guess I’m saying I don’t really care that some derivative games come out from major publishers anymore. If all you care about is AAA, sure, it’s been stagnant for a while, but even that space is seeing some new blood this year. If all you like is military shooters, yeah, there’s not a lot to look forward to right now, pretty stagnant genre. But if you’re willing to branch out and try new things, there’s a whole world of weird and wonderful stuff to check out.
Hope for the Future
So ultimately, I do have to agree with Kojima who did basically say the same thing. The AAA games industry is in a rut that is hard to deny and I don’t think people should deny it. But there is also real innovation happening in the indie and thankfully growing AA games market. We’re getting stuff that’s just not the same old thing that’s actually making money because it’s not the same old thing.
Hopefully AAA GameMaker starts to notice that because there are current plans of sticking their heads in the sand and doing whatever is as safe as they can possibly imagine isn’t actually safe. Hopefully, they’ll realize that and try some new things. ‘Cause there needs to be some fresh new ideas, new franchises for the industry to thrive.
And not just from small studios because, to be frank, the big studios making stuff that is broad and appealing to large numbers of people is why there’s a large games industry. If everything is hopelessly niche, if there is nothing that is universal, that fails too. And I would even argue that that’s kind of where we are right now.
The big guys that make the games that more people play have just swung a little bit too hard into the bland territory and made a lot of the same stuff. But I’ll tell you the reason why these games where they just go and try to generate whales fail, it’s the same reason we do need these big developers making broad games.
If you have like 10 whales doing 70% of your business, yes, you need those 10 people around more than you need the rest of the people around. But the rest of the people are what make the game fun. Those whales aren’t gonna stick around if the game isn’t fun, if there isn’t a thriving community. And that is what those big broad AAA developers exist to do, more or less. So hopefully, they can start doing that. They probably will.
I mean, I did say it’s cyclical, so let’s keep our eyes out for the good stuff. And I don’t know, maybe these business people will get out of everybody’s hair and let people make good games again.
What do you think? Leave us a comment. Let us know. And as always, your thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time right here on Aura Riot.
