video game sales WAY down in April... are we looking at a crash?

[G-Boobie]

Thing is the ones you listed are mostly shooters/GTA-oneoffs that have already saturated the market in one form or another, which's no problem if you're the guy making serious coin off them, unless developers are getting sick and tired of them too.

Sounds like all genres of video games ever. Space Invaders clones, Pac Man clones, and Pong clones in the arcade days, mascot platformers and shmups on the 8 and 16 bit era, fighting games, Japanese RPGs, RTS games, FPS titles on both PC and console, sandbox games, World of Warcraft style MMOs were rampant for a while, there are something like seven or eight DOTA clones out there now with more on the way, every game has a horde mode now for some reason, there isn't a number large enough to count the number of Farmville clones available on every platform ever, and that goes double for tower defense... Innovation tends to come through iteration of safe, provably profitable foundations. And when a game DOES do something new and exciting and popular, everyone copies them. Since the dawn of time, and throughout all media; not just games.

And so what of it? I get tired of people whining that all that comes out anymore are Call of Duty clones and GTA clones, because not only is that bullshit, but the nostalgia that usually lurks behind the sentiment is a view of the past through the rosiest of glasses. In fifteen years we'll have to listen to the CoD generation whine about the exact same thing, defaming whatever is popular and reminiscing about how better everything was back in their day. Nostalgia is as dangerous a drug as anything that's out there. It's one thing to fondly remember an era you were in love with; its entirely another to allow that to warp your perception of the present.