> Skylines probably will increase sales of the next SimCity due to more attention to this genre.

Maxis is gone, I'm not sure I care to play another city sim made by EA without the creative team that made SimCity 1-4 such a joy.

It bugs me that the video games industry (both production and consumption side) seems to have a looser relationship with creative talent than, for example, the movie industry. A Quentin Tarantino or Guillermo Del Toro can get all kind of pet projects greenlit within the movie industry and on the consumer side fans of these directors will show up to anything with their name on it (I know I will). That doesn't happen as much in games where even a hit-maker like Kojima gets treated pretty poorly by his studio meanwhile the franchise he's known for shambles on like a zombie after his departure - still making money. See also: Call of Duty after Vince Zampella and Jason West.

It's interesting that movies put their stars'/creators' names everywhere, while many gamers only see that info on a credits screen after finishing a game. Is that because actors/producers/etc have such powerful unions?

I'd like games to be more like movies in this respect. I can imagine spending a lot of time browsing an IMDb for games....

EA got started with the idea of creating stars out of game devs, it flopped spectacularly.

http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-farther/

I wonder if this might partially be a function of company size - I know that some indie developers are relatively well-known, and have a relatively guaranteed audience for whatever their next game might be, even if that next game is in a different franchise or genre.