It's because they change: They tell new stories. They look better. They play better. They introduce completely new mechanics.
Persona: we're up to 5 in 25 years (almost 30 now!), during which time we've seen a massive increase in compute on consoles. Having a new game every 5 years seems very reasonable.
It’s such an absurdly bad take they can’t be serious.
In football anybody in the world who has legs and can walk can perform the main goal of football which is to get a ball into a very large net. It doesnt take any skill to perform the feat whatsoever. The skill only comes with who you choose to play against. From that angle, it is just 20 people chasing a ball around, it just depends on the skill level of the players as to whether that is interesting to you or not.
With programming, not everybody with fingers can achieve the end goal which is to write working software. It takes years of learning and practice to be able to make even the most basic piece of software, whereas my 2 year old child can reliably kick a ball into a net.
The difference between the two is that football, and sport in general, creates enjoyment by intense moments of tension and excitement in a small space of time. Programming is an intellectual activity, where its payoff is in solving mathematical and logical puzzles to achieve a goal. Its not far fetched to see that people who get enjoyment from one type thing might not enjoy the other.
Why does everybody have to enjoy everything?
The people denigrating football are referring to the Premier League, La Liga, etc. It’s nothing to do with skill and everything to do with snobbery.
> It takes years of learning and practice to be able to make even the most basic piece of software, whereas my 2 year old child can reliably kick a ball into a net.
You’re starting to sound like those people.
> Why does everybody have to enjoy everything?
I didn’t say you did, all I said was that it’s a sad cultural behaviour that I’ve seen to denigrate things other people enjoy.
I don’t even watch football that much, I picked it because of its popularity.
Of course someone there is looking at the balance sheet and noticing that recycling is actually profitable so who can blame them if we want to keep repurchasing the shinier version of the thing we liked before?
Then I suppose we have ourselves to blame — or not.
I suspect the OP though is bemoaning the lack of new, original ideas that this kind of commerce workflow eschews. (Myself, I'm not into first person shooters and so essentially walked away from mainstream gaming decades ago.)
> It's because they change
That's not true at all. I don't return to the same great restaurant because it's new and different. If I wanted that, I'd look for a different restaurant.
I go back to the same great restaurant because I'm hungry again.
Now if i had 17 unique paintings exploring a variety of motifs and styles, each one with a story to tell that would actually be worth talking about.
Then I’d compliment your ability to create a flowing theme throughout the house.
The problem with your analogy here is that art for the home (or anywhere outside a museum or gallery) is generally bought to compliment the overall aesthetics of the building, rather than to be enjoyed in isolation.
> Now if i had 17 unique paintings exploring a variety of motifs and styles, each one with a story to tell that would actually be worth talking about.
That’s called “eclectic”, which is basically an artsy way of saying “mismatched”. Some people dig that style. Personally I don’t.
Who are the millions of people who watch, for the 20th time in their life, how Character A does something unrealistically stupid, ends up in an awkward situation, and then spend the rest of the episode being continuously teased over it by other characters, because they're all written to be slightly stupid and low-key assholes.
This is not to criticize sitcoms and reality shows (and people watching them) here, but rather to point out that the same phenomenon you described also manifests with vastly more popular forms of entertainment, so there must be something to enjoying the experience beyond sheer originality.
NBC and Nintendo, no evolution or original thought. Just copy paste it to the masses because its all the seem to want anyway based on this thread.
Maybe im wrong for demanding more....
Evolution and original stuff are amazing and we should want them to exist. To be disappointed because we also have stuff that isn't like that is to turn a blind eye to what makes up a lot of our life.
The reality is that there is room for studios to release original content AND sequels.
For every Star Wars and Marvel rehash there is a Big Hero 6, Elementals, and Zootopia.
And for every Nintendo there are a dozen indie games studios releasing creative new games.
The key to avoiding rehashes is literally just to avoid them. ;)
In some ways this is the optimal way for a video game company to innovate as they need ROI (people don't generally buy new IPs in high numbers even if they're really good and it often takes a couple of installments to build trust and sales!) so creating new gameplay out of trusted IPs is a good way of achieving that.
However, every new Mario Kart game is genuinely distinct from its predecessor. You can show me any screenshot of any Mario Kart game, and I will immediately be able to identify what version it is.
Have you considered that you may just be very out of touch?
Religion is really the worst offender. Same service with same text time after time, year after year. Like they do not even take effort to mix it up every couple years or rewrite it...
Surely there is at least one thing that you enjoy in your life that is fairly similar across iterations.
People are excited to buy new cloths, even though they're "just a slight variance on something you've already had multiple times before".
They love to try out the new hyped-up food stand, even though the hotdog will be just a slight variance on all the hotdogs they had before.
Video games don't wear out, you can still play the same software you bought in 2003 today.
Not to mention, for Perosna in particular, each Perosna game tells a whole new story, so buying the fifth one is like going to see the fifth movie in a franchise: you know you like the style, and you want to experience a new story in this style. It's also not even a very long series - compare to Final Fantasy, for example, which will soon get its 17th main game (probably more like 25th or something if you included spinoffs).
The way you perceive them does, at least did back in 2023 (or 2013) and earlier.
You pick up, say, original Half Life or something from that time; story-wise it's the same game you remember, but in terms of experience, is nigh-unplayable in its original form now, because you already experienced how decades of progress in videogames look like. Not just in terms of graphics, though that is a big part, but also in terms of UI! Properly mapped controls and GUI behaviors are alone worth looking up/waiting for a remake. And/or, the Nth installment of a game in the same universe.
Every good game has odd control schemes, that doesn't mean it's worn out.
IMO the quality of games has gone greatly downhill, and when I pick up something old like Doom 3, Half Life 2, or Portal, I am staggered by how good they are in comparison to most of the unity based slop which currently passes for games.
I last played Mario Kart on Nintendo Wii and enjoyed it. That's 17 years ago. I'll probably buy one of the newer versions at some point. And it will be very different from the game I played.
I know people who rewatch the same TV series every year and go to the same vacation every year.
Fear of change is deep.
Myself, I'm quite open to new forms of entertainment, as well as those previously unknown to me. Even within my favorite genres, I'm more than happy to explore - but I'm still gonna rewatch at least one Star Trek show each year.
It doesn't matter that I've seen most of those show 6-10 times each over the course of my life; it doesn't matter that I've watched some specific episodes 20+ times already. What matters to me is, each time I see those characters and those locations, it feels like coming home.
(And more so than actually coming home.)
People anchor to different things like this, not just TV shows. Sometimes it's a real place (or an event in that place - e.g. vacation), sometimes it's a club, sometimes it's a video game or an outdoor hobby.
And even if a "new and interesting concept" turns up, it's is too bothersome to learn for them. That's why once they find the fun in one thing, they tend to stick to it and be blind to others.
Play Persona 5 Royal, then Persona 1. Tell us it's the same game and everybody would think you are crazy. Hell, even Persona 5 Royal is way better than Persona 5 in a lot of ways...
Maybe you are satisfied by only trying out completely new things—if they even exist—but most people don't.
Why do you have such a problem with other people enjoying that type of content?
Everything in life can be much more complicated and nuanced if you put an effort in it as reality has infinite amount of details. There is a lot of value in refining successful concepts.
Also a lot of “new and interesting concepts” turn out not to be that useful or that interesting like not that many people listening to experimental music or reading novels whose writers think they are smarter than everyone else.
For someone else, it might be reading Hacker News.
For you, it’s video games.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with differences of opinion, even to the point of bewilderment, but it doesn’t feel productive to question people’s interests and reduce them to, frankly, disingenuous levels of oversimplification.
I think one of the more beautiful parts of the internet is how we can be connected and talk about our differences and understand each other better. But it does not seem like you are truly attempting to understand, instead your posts read more like “looking down one’s nose,” which isn’t fruitful or productive for anyone.
Maybe I am mistaken! If so, I’d like to encourage you to try to reach understanding of others without depicting them as “mad” or financially wasteful or simple-minded.
[1] though my favorite time doing it was catching smelt on the docks on the back side of the barrier island at Hampton Beach with my grandparents and bringing back enough to fill the freezer
I agree with the responders that this is a common fallacy (good insights / learnings for us all). Eg I like following baseball but if you were to ask me about it 10 years ago I’d be pretty reductive about. I agree with the responders that there’s beauty in the seemingly little things at first that build. That said not all of us take the time to appreciate certain areas of beauty because there’s a lot of beauty out there. And that’s ok but nature does seem to indicate repetition and variation are fine.
Who are the 7 million people going out to buy the 20th Persona game? What are you actually hoping to get from it that isn't just a slight variance on something you've already had multiple times before?
I have friends genuinely excited to go buy Mario Cart for the 17th time this year... Once you've made two objects move along an enclosed route at differing speeds and slapped Nintendo marketing on top hasn't the game play evolved as much as possible?
Could the money not be better spent coming up with new and interesting concepts rather than copy pasting the same stuff out every 12-18 months?