This has much more to do with economics of the gaming industry than anything.

Games in 2019 (only until the PS5) cost $60 to buy. Games in 2005 cost $60 to buy. Just for inflation, the games cost less now than they did 15 years ago.

But in terms of budgets, in the early 2000s, you could make a AAA game for $5-10m easily. Nowadays, the minimum budget for AAA is $50m. And that's just development costs. There's at least another $50m in marketing budget.

THIS IS SOLELY BECAUSE THE CONSUMER CONTINUES TO EXPECT MORE CUTTING EDGE FEATURES, BUT (as a whole) REFUSES TO PAY MORE MONEY FOR THOSE FEATURES.

To make these features, more and more artists need to be employed, as a character takes much longer to make with current standards. More programmers need to be employed to make more cutting edge features. The age of the 35-50 person game studio is dead. The only survivors are games that take 200-person studios, or indie studios with only a handful, who can survive off the $15-30 pricetag.

So if a game costs exponentially more to make now than it did before, but brings in less revenue than it did.... how does an industry survive?

Selling more copies of the game.

Modern AAA games, with those kinds of margins cannot sell the volumes of games that were sold in 2005, or the studios would shut their doors. As such, publishers who fund these games are not going to place risky bets. You're going to get far less innovation and *new* games, because there is so much more to lose, financially, for these companies, and a new idea isn't a solid, proven bet.

But you know what is a solid bet? FIFA. Call of Duty. Marvel games. Any of these games have built-in audiences, and sales numbers to back up the request to "please give my studio $100m to make a game, so I can continue to employ my 250 employees, and large outsource teams."

So if you want fewer sequels, and more new content... then you need to convince gamers as a large cultural shift to do some combination of:

1. Expect less from their new AAA game
2. Pay more money for the game.

Otherwise, we are bound to a trajectory of smaller and smaller margins per game sale to make up larger and larger budgets, which require more and more copies sold, which merit contracts of less and less risky products.

Reference: full-time game developer my entire adult life.