Why Are Video Game Showcases So Boring Now?

Welcome back to Remastered! This week, I had mixed feelings about some of the new games announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live, so I decided to blog about it! I've also recapped the retro-related reveals from this week's three big showcases.

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Gamescom Opening Night Live Made Me Wonder If I Still Like Games

Are new video games getting less and less interesting upon their reveals, or am I just getting older? That’s a question I was asking myself after Gamescom Opening Night Live (ONL), and the answer to it is a lot more complicated than the simple either-or structure of my question suggests. It’s a nuanced feeling, and something that speaks to both the maturity of the game industry and the very modern struggles it’s currently facing.

In some ways, it is good that this medium has established itself so well that the freshness of new video games is starting to wear off. In other ways, it is incredibly worrying. ONL continued a trend started by many of June's gaming showcases and painted a picture of an industry that’s codified almost every part of itself and is now scared to take risks.

We are still getting a lot of wonderful new games in 2026, but ONL shows that the video game industry is barreling headlong into a future I hope it avoids.

Fresh indies like Murals, Mariachi Legends, and Lofsong also stole the show at ONL, but the event was truly defined by big-budget games that blended together or simply reminded me of games I’ve already played. Hoyoverse debuted Nodusfall, a Soulslike with art direction and combat that look like they’re copying Elden Ring’s homework. At least two Pokémon-inspired creature collectors got trailers. And there were multiple live-service shooters with a quirky sense of humor that looked a lot like PUBG (one of which was literally a PUBG spin-off). 

When games weren’t direct clones, they felt like hodgepodges of some of the most popular game franchises. Ananta’s trailer in particular made it look like a chaotic mashup of every popular AAA game and meme from the last decade, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Moving from anime action to driving to skateboarding to a meme reference made the unveiling feel disjointed and gave me the vibe that the game is throwing a bunch of stuff it knows people like at the wall to see what sticks, rather than refining a good core idea to make it great. 

While most of the games I’ve mentioned are from Asian studios, Western developers didn’t fare much better, with Gravhounds and Exterminauts not doing a lot to stand out from the wealth of co-op shooters I can already play. Because so many of the reveals and announcements at ONL lacked impact, it didn’t really feel like it was as meaningful and packed a show as its creators clearly thought it was. 

While dozens of new games were shown off at ONL, it didn’t feel like it. It exacerbates a trend I’ve been tracking for some time, where new game announcements lack the magic of the 2010s or even the early 2020s. Some of that has to do with me maturing and fully immersing myself in the industry to the point that new announcements come off as less of a surprise. That said, I think there are a few factors related to the games themselves.

First off, the language of game design has been codified to the point that games often don’t shock me with their originality. While the visuals and mechanics of games like Elden Ring impressed upon release, they’re now old news. Seeing Nodusfall and my only real thought on it being “it’s Elden Ring, but this time from the Genshin Impact devs” isn’t enough to get me excited anymore. That said, I can understand exactly why Nodusfall got greenlit.

It’s no secret that the video game industry is going through an extremely rough patch right now, with a large number of layoffs, high-profile flops, and massive changes in strategy from its biggest companies. As such, it’s safer for studios and investors to replay the hits and make something that they think people will like. 

That approach makes even more sense when, as in Gravhounds’ case, the studio is sold on having talent that worked on titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Chinese game studios, which are made up of developers who went mostly uncredited as co-devs on a lot of the last decade’s biggest hits, are particularly skilled at creating game mechanics players love and then combining them all into one new game. Something like Ananta feels tailor-made to appeal exactly to what a “gamer” would want.

Maybe they’ll find success doing that, but it removes some of the magic from new games. I avoid acting as if gaming was better in the “good ol’ days” in this newsletter, because past decades followed different trends and carried issues of their own. Still, I can’t say I’m a fan of the direction of the video game industry over the past few years, and that’s made events like ONL increasingly less enjoyable to me. 

Watching ONL, I couldn’t help but feel that the video game industry is in the midst of a similar moment. It’s so concerned with creating products that it thinks people will like that it’s no longer heavily experimenting with new concepts that players will come to love. Add in the fact that over 20% of the games used generative AI slop, and it’s no wonder that everything is further homogenizing and blending together.

I get that there’s some irony in arguing this point of view in a newsletter dedicated to retro-inspired games and re-releases. But when everything is trying to be nostalgic, nothing is. Still, I think there are clever ways in which throwbacks and spiritual successors can stand out from the crowd. Theropods takes the hallmarks of classic point-and-click adventure games and creates a beautiful dialog-free adventure. The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time uses the aesthetics of retro RPGs but presents them as an Inscryption-like puzzle game. 

The problem isn’t necessarily that new games are taking inspiration from older ones. The issue is that many new games aren’t using that established foundation to build something original. ONL even had some examples of pre-existing concept mashups done right, such as Rainbow Six Tactics (Rainbow Six Siege meets XCOM) and Lego Skylines (Lego meets Cities: Skylines). 

Great things can come from being inspired by existing art, but many of the titles at ONL felt like they were riffing on older games out of obligation rather than inspiration. Part of my decreased enthusiasm might be because I’m getting older, and gaudy commercial fests don’t impress 27-year-old me as much as they did my teenage self. But that feeling is also sinking in because the industry itself seems currently obsessed with recreating the glory days of its teenage years, which are long gone. That approach to art bores me.

What's Old Is News

Pixel Arcadia, Gamescom Opening Night Live, and Future Games Show recaps

Three major Gamescom-related showcases took place this past week, and I’ve rounded up many of the relevant announcements from them. That starts with Pixel Arcadia, which took place on August 24. As you can probably tell from its title, that showcase focused on retro rereleases and retro-inspired games. You can check out a full list of announcements on Pure Xbox, but these were my highlights of the show:

• Clear River Games is re-releasing Terranigma in 2027.
• Dotemu shadow-dropped the Bomberman-inspired Blasterbug: Last Bug Standing. It’s completely free, but has paid Absolum crossover DLC.
• Ninja JaJaMaru: Yokai Night Parade was announced, bringing back a Japanese-exclusive game series that got its start on the Famicom.
• The revival of Irem’s Ninja Baseball League-Man beat ‘em up will feature a crossover stage based on Jaleco’s Bases Loaded series of sports games. It launches in December.
• Ziggurat announced Sanitarium Enhanced, a re-release of a cult classic PC horror game from the late 1990s. 
• Sneg Games teased upcoming re-releases of cult classic PC games, including Theocracy, Ecstatica 1 and 2, Warlord 4, Dark Earth, Soldiers at War, and more. 
• MicroProse announced console ports of Carrier Command 2. 
• A new company bearing the Commodore name announced Alien Breed: 35th Anniversary, a re-release of all six games in the series, launching next month. 

Gamescom Opening Night Live then took place on August 25, and these were its retro-relevant reveals:

• Worms: Galactic Tactics brings the classic strategy game series back in 2027.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon Wonderworks was announced by Atari and features Bubsy. It'll initially be released as a Steam Early Access game.
• Mariachi Legends is a Mexican Metroidvania out April 27, 2027.
• Mega Man: Dual Override’s latest trailer revealed a boss named Twinkle Girl, as well as Proto Man's return. It's out in 2027.
• Rayman Legends Retold showed off a new musical level based on the song Macarena. 
• Pony Island 2 looks mind-bendingly great and features a lot of retro-inspired games that I’m sure players will be able to break the confines of. It also launches on April 27, 2027. 
• The ridiculous-looking Showa: American Story features fake arcade games based on retro classics like Space Harrier. 
• Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is getting a remake.
• Final Fantasy 7: Revelation got a new trailer showing off some of its biggest bosses. 
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered was announced and launches September 29. 

Finally, a new edition of the Future Games Show aired on August 26, and had a few more announcements to spotlight:

• In addition to Worms: Galactic Tactics, another more traditional Worms game simply titled Worms was confirmed to be in development at Absolutely Games.
• Negan was confirmed as a playable character for The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival, a retro-styled beat ‘em up launching on September 18.
• Graveyard Keeper 2 got a September 22 release date.

Raw Fury revealed Kingdom 3: Rising Realms, but it does not have a release date.

I’ll be able to share more about what I’ve recently been playing soon, but in the meantime I wanted to spotlight two other games that caught my interest this past week:

Ascent DX: This indie Metroidvania just came to Nintendo Switch, and I really enjoyed playing it there. You’re slowly exploring an alien planet after crash-landing on it, slowly gaining new abilities that morph your body over time. It might not be the most original platformer I’ve ever played, but it’s incredibly slick to play and features some wonderful Pico-8 64x64 pixel art. Ascent DX shows that when you simply boil a genre down to its very fundamentals, you can still get something great. It’s free to download on Steam and very cheap on Nintendo Switch. 

Marvel Snap: I play this mobile card game almost daily, but now I finally feel comfortable recommending that new people check it out after the addition of a Draft mode. This mode drastically lowers the barrier of entry for the card game, giving you access to draft many great cards and build out decks with unique augments, and it’s the freshest Marvel Snap has felt since its 2022 launch. 

That’s all for Remastered this week. Consider subscribing for free or supporting me on Ko-fi to help independent games media thrive. I also wanted to give a heads-up that next week’s newsletter will arrive early, on August 31, due to an embargo I don’t want to miss.