Dev costs make investors risk-averse (Score 2, Insightful)

I agree with the premise that people are buying fewer games because of sequelitis and the general lack of originality, but what's more interesting to me is, why has the industry in general gotten less innovative? I think a big part of it is because of the skyrocketing costs of making a game. In the 80s, one or two guys could make a game in a matter of months. Now you need teams of dozens (if not hundreds) of professionals, not to mention higher costs for marketing, development and content creation tools, etc.

It seems like the increased capabilities of game systems these days has caused the cost of making a game to grow exponentially, while only giving us linear improvements in the quality of the games themselves. Investors are much more likely to fund a game based on a known property (a sequel, a sports game, a movie knockoff...) than something totally original from out of the blue. It's much more difficult to recoup the costs of making a game than it used to be, so gambling on an unknown quantity has far worse consequences than it did back in the day.

I have a feeling that a lot of the future growth and innovation in the market is going to come from handheld systems (due to lower development costs), and from companies like Nintendo who aren't so concerned with milking every last polygon from the hardware, but are more focused on innovations in gameplay.