"Games" span a much broader spectrum of entertainment types than movies. At one end there's the interactive story, and personally I would include most modern FPS'es in this genre, at least as far as the single player experience goes. The story is on rails and you get to shoot a little here and drive a little there. At the other end is the pure game mechanics, the sandbox where you are the director, in the words of Miyamoto (although his own games fall somewhere in the middle IMHO). Minecraft is a good example, but even GTA belongs in this end, since the most fun is to be had just playing with the game mechanics, rather than in completing the story.
There's room for a huge amount of variety along this scale and there is a lot of room at both ends of the spectrum. Often these different game types even address totally separate target markets.
You sound like you think you're disagreeing, but you're not. The point is precisely that games can span a huge array of things, but AAA games are (almost) all trying to jam themselves into the same small "cinematic" bit of the space, basically literally at all costs. AAA games are absolutely staggeringly absurdly expensive for what gets ever closer and closer to a movie.
I do not have a current-gen console so I'll concede that I don't have direct experience, but the reviewers I trust to tell me whether a AAA game sucks or not (i.e., neither giving automatic 8/10+s because they're big advertisers nor automatically slagging things simply because they're "sellouts" or something) have all been telling the same story lately on things like Destiny and The Order: 1886, which is that the gameplay is often OK to good-ish but it's increasingly obvious that the games are so gosh-darned ambitious and expensive now that they're getting brutally cut down to even be able to ship anything, where simultaneously the story is obviously supposed to be very important because vast, vast resources are dedicated to the cut scenes, set pieces, and the "set" (another frequent complaint being "incredibly beautiful skyboxes behind a linear corridor with chest-high walls"), yet at the same time it's obvious that huge holes have been blown in the stories by cuts and once you factor out the cut scenes, the games are almost insubstantial. In the case of Destiny, perhaps still quite fun, but not very substantial.
The "previous gen" showed the trend pretty strongly and many of us thought the gaming companies would be forced to pull out of the current trends, but so far into the current gen it really does seem that AAA will literally sacrifice everything to be "cinematic". Absolutely everything, including even good cinematic storytelling, because many of these games have been so shredded in editing that if they really were a movie they'd seriously make Uwe Boll movies look coherent by comparison. Everything must be sacrificed to good-looking cut scenes. It's getting quite absurd.
"even GTA belongs in this end, since the most fun is to be had just playing with the game mechanics, rather than in completing the story."
And this is a great example of what I mean, albeit in the previous gen... here's an interesting video where someone explores the incredible tension between the fun little mechanics in GTA IV that it goes to great efforts to create, and then how much of them it sacrificed on the altar of a "cinematic story": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E32j9ufrpoE
> You sound like you think you're disagreeing, but you're not. The point is precisely that games can span a huge array of things, but AAA games are (almost) all trying to jam themselves into the same small "cinematic" bit of the space, basically literally at all costs. AAA games are absolutely staggeringly absurdly expensive for what gets ever closer and closer to a movie.
How much of that is a product of circular reasoning, though? What is a "AAA game"? Is Civ 5? Are the games in the Total War series? Is this a case where, because of perception, in order to be considered AAA a game needs to reach for the "cinematic"?
"In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion"
Civ 5 and Total War are awesome games, but I don't think they reach the same amounts of sales and gross as the AAA titles (they might be more profitable, I don't know).
Only Minecraft cracks the list of top 10 bestsellers in 2014:
Not all AAA games do try to jam themselves in to the cinematic space.
A lot do, but then you have to think about what it means to be a AAA game. Basically, what is it that causes a game to require a huge budget?
A huge budget is generally due to a lot of assets. A lot of assets is generally very high detail models and cinematics, the tools to tell a story.
The other thing is technology, things like creating an MMORPG is technologically expensive. But look at your average MMO and note how they generally lack on the story side of things.
Gameplay on its own is pretty lean. You can't put a team of 100 designers together and get a great game in 1% of the time, but you can do something (with good direction) somewhat similar with artists. You can have one guy doing the rocks, and one guy doing the hair, and a few guys doing architectural stuff, and some people doing monsters, and they can all fit together.
With gameplay though, it's too much the essence of the game to be split across too many roles and still work well.
So you look at something like The Order: 1886, and you complain about how cut down it is because it's so expensive to make. But think about what that game is. It's a game to sell PS4s essentially. Each new generation of console gives access to great new graphics and performance. But when you have the ability to render the movement on the hairs on your characters arms, you have to hire someone to put hairs on peoples arms and make sure they act correctly in the wind.
You can certainly make games with lower detail, but then what is the point of the new generation of console? This is why I think the majority of games out there for the next gen consoles are either cross-releases with current gen consoles with some moderate performance or upscaling, or they are pretty but underwhelming.
The best stage to be creative is in the small teams of the 80s, and the more recent indie resurgence. When you employ a battalion of creative people to make your game, you absolutely need to sell it. You can't take a risk. And not only do you have to sell it, you have to sell big.
On the other hand, if you're a team of 4 people, sure you don't want to go broke, but you can afford to make something that you think might be niche. The especially cool part about that is that sometimes these teams discover something that we never knew we always wanted. Take minecraft, little hobby project that can be done only because it's a little hobby project, but ends up earning millions and being sold for billions.
And now it's on the PS4 too.
The problem isn't the game industry. It's the AAA game industry and the pressure to sell consoles with more power than people need to play a fun game. The more detailed the games are, the more expensive they are to make. The more expensive they are to make, the less risks they can take creatively.
This (and the internet) is the reason the Indie scene is pretty forefront right now.
There's room for a huge amount of variety along this scale and there is a lot of room at both ends of the spectrum. Often these different game types even address totally separate target markets.