This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants.
Looking at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_flight_simulation_games#Space_combat_games
…there really were far more games in the genre being released in the late 1990s and early 2000s than there have been recently.
A similar sort of phenomenon occurred for World War II first-person shooters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games
Back around the same time period, there was a glut of games in the genre, and they really have fallen off quite a bit.
Whether it’s a genre like these two, that hasn’t seen many new entrants recently, or a genre that just never grew as much as you’d like, what genre would you like to see more of?
Lovecraftian horror games. There have been some games in recent years but I think there’s definitely a larger design space for this kind of thing. This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.
Searching Steam for games tagged as lovecraft and horror and sorting by user review gives me about 500 entries.
I think that Lovecraft’s setting is actually virtually the only fictional setting where you’re spoiled for choice, because Lovecraft permitted other people to use his setting. Like, you only get to do a Star Wars game if Lucasarts licenses it, because they leverage their copyright on the setting. Most people and companies who create a setting don’t allow other people to freely use it, and copyright law permits them to make that restriction. But Lovecraft was unusual in that he specifically encouraged other people to build on his world.
Maybe Robin Hood or a small handful of others from history, like Greek or Norse mythology, that developed before copyright law had really become the norm.
I dunno. Maybe there should be some kind of Creative Commons license that permits use of setting and maybe characters, while still keeping an individual work copyrighted, to encourage creation of collaboratively-developed settings like that.
One of the top entries I see on Steam – though I’ve never played it – is an Overwhelmingly Positive-rated game, Disfigure, that appears to be a Lovecraftian action roguelike that just came out a couple of months ago.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2083160/Disfigure/
EDIT: Well, hmm. Someone tagged it as Lovecraftian, but the author doesn’t really describe it that way. Just creepy.