I wish I had a bigger vocabulary.
Its like a lot of the action movies from the 90's. Most of it is the same generic crap but because of all the lovely explosions and such the average viewer doesnt really notice or even care.
Soon as anything shows to be good or have potential it gets milked like a brand new super duper milking machine with no operator and the cow looks like she's gonna die. 1st person shooters are a fine example. Wolfenstein was OK. Doom was pretty nice. Got too popular, thats what the majority of games have been for many years. And most of them are crap. And the ones which arent crap are still very unimaginative and basically rehashing the same old material. Similar game play elements, very similar visual tapestry. We finally got off the WWII kick and now we are awash in a sea of post-modern wartime games, most of which are just clones of each other. I couldnt even tell you what the first one to kick of the genre was called.
In fact I often wonder what modern games would be like if Id had never tried that first person perspective for an action game. It would have been discovered eventually, I'm sure. Hollywood did it plenty of times before Id was even formed. But all the other games would have evolved differently I bet.
Strategy games have that issue too. Dune was probably the first popular, mainstream RTS and all of the current popular mainstream games are really just clones of it with better graphics. Theres very few original design elements which are truly original. Again, if that game hadnt come out or been popular, I wonder what modern titles would look like.
(I say popular cuz there was others before it but they never caught on and were ignored by the masses.)
In fact Dune was really just a copy of other TBS's and one day somebody realized modern computers had the processing power to move units around the board in real time, not turn based.
I played Siege back in the good old days and while it was technically real time the units moved so slowly and methodically it felt more like automated TBS. I think Dune probably got some ideas from them, too.