Games is one of those industries that I can't fathom how to do profitably, and that's why I'm not a game designer. There's just so much competition and I don't really understand the market either.
However, players will desire more of that similar experience. Ask anybody who just finished a good game and they'll tell you how finishing it left a void, and that they're looking for a similar game to fill that void again. Once you see this, it's easy to understand why there is an ocean of very similar games out there that still manage to sell in good numbers.
I think this has changed a lot since the early 2000s. There are now plenty of "forever games" where players spend hundreds or thousands of hours in, especially MMOs and free-to-play games. And even traditional AAA franchises like CoD or Battlefield are essentially just releasing new episodes of the same 'forever game' with updated graphics but the same gameplay.
You said it yourself, CoD and Battlefield have to keep releasing new similar games, not coast off the last one.
If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make.
Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well.
If you spend $1 million and don’t have a hit on your hands, it’s probably just an OK or bad game. Another $5 million or $105 million would’ve been just more good money after bad.
I just don't believe there would be many gamers with modern sensibilities who would play it or like it. And the more casual audience have found other things. So you do not need the showcase of multimedia spectacle to justify buying an computer...
I recently played the remakes, and I have 8 hours in Myst and 12 in Riven. Compare that to 21 hours in Return of the Obra Dinn, 44 hours in Outer Wilds, or 90 hours in Blue Prince, or hell 35 hours in Terraformental (whose GUI is essentially a text adventure game). Compared to modern puzzle games, Myst is just so short; there's surprisingly little of actual substance there.
As a modern game, Myst does largely hold up. The puzzles are still quite reasonably by modern standards (indeed, in many ways, Myst did revolutionize the puzzle game genre). As an example of environmental story-telling, it's still one of the premier examples. But the game is extremely thin by modern standards. And the remakes never did a proper redesign to account for how unrestricted 3d motion requires you to change how to guide the player's attention to key objects (in Myst, the key "what am I supposed to do" letter to start the game is surprisingly hard to find, even when you know where it roughly is!). And puzzle games have never been a strong genre--Myst is more notable for its role as a tech demo than for its role as a puzzle game.
i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered.
Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.
But the dev nonetheless thought it was a great and underserved idea. So he cleaned up the concept, got rid of the ads and other mobile crap, brought it to PC, and made $millions. His idea was then widely cloned, but games are much closer to art than commodities - so one can't expect clones to do as well as the 'original work' when they're being sold in the exact same gallery. That said, some of the clones also did extremely well when they meaningfully iterated upon the concept instead of just outright mimicking it. For instance Halls of Torment is another great game in the genre.
That's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I point you to one of these games, you can just say "but it wasn't actually good, otherwise it would have been more successful" or "the fact that you know about it shows that it was at least somewhat successful".
Mediocre games also happen to blow up all the time. So I'm sure there's a lot of sentiment around not getting that lucky.
I also think it's a spectrum. You need a good enough game and to be lucky.
People complain that games get rated 7/10. But I think more so 7/10 is often bare minimum of game worth dedicating time for unless you really low the genre or specific thing. So while average game would be 5/10. An average game that is worth buying and sells is actually more so 7/10.
We had a lot of fun building it and I used Lua and LÖVE2D to basically build a game engine for a boat game in an isometric world.
But to take something like that to something that pays the bills... mindboggling.
Factorio and Minecraft each took over a decade, and scrapped and redesigned core game mechanics many times. Half-Life 2 had a completely different storyline one year before release, and Ocarina of Time had a completely different environment. The Witness spent years testing puzzles and layouts in a blocky programmer world before finalizing it and making it beautiful. Baba Is You obviously also spent ages testing and trying a zillion combinations of puzzle elements. And those are just the ones at the top of my head.
You don't need as much to make a slop shooter that's moderately fun and relies on graphics and action gameplay. However, that market is saturated precisely because it is easier.