It seems that in today’s gaming market everything successful has a 2, 3, 4 etc… after its name. Crackdown 2, Modern Warfare 2, GTA 4, Forza 3. New IP’s are great but there is another sequel.

Now don’t get me wrong I love sequels, Assassin’s Creed 2 was my game of the year last year, but why does almost every good game get a sequel? In the film industry you get you multi million one offs. Titanic, Avatar etc… so why can’t we settle for a one off game?

Modern Warfare 2 broke almost every entertainment record in sight, but would it have done if CoD4 hadn’t been release? You take a film like Titanic, it’s one of the biggest grossing entities of all time, but there is no prequel, there is no Titanic 2. OK it’s true story but my point is there doesn’t need to be a series and that maybe we are missing out on good games because every good game is expected to have a sequel.

Bioshock is a great example of this, many people loved the first game yet when Bioshock 2 was released it was met with scepticism. Maybe Bioshock could have been the game to show the industry that a collection of "one offs" is just as good as one series.

Personally I would rather play 5 good games that are totally different from one company than play the same game with a new skin and a few new features. I fear this chance has/is disappearing rapidly. With Call of Duty:Black Ops out pacing Modern Warfare 2 pre-orders all ready, publisher will see money and go for the brand rather than the experience in my opinion. Why couldn’t Activision let Infinity Ward work on something new? The answer is clearly money, which is a shame as it seems gamers are now second to the mighty dollar.

I guess what I am trying to get across is that I feel the "core" of gamers have become narrow minded and stick to a brand and not a genre like the film industry. If gamers were more into a particular genre would we get more games? More variety? More advances in gaming technology? All these questions are hard to answer with out seeing it happen, which is a shame and I feel as a collective market we are all missing out.