At the end of the day some of this comes down to market incentives. A public company is expected to grow. For a gaming company this means either shipping more games or bigger games. If you ship more games, at some point you start cannibalizing your own sales (e.g. how many different shooters can you make that would have non-overlapping audiences?) so you go bigger.
Notice this affliction doesn't affect some of the more successful private, indie studios. Supergiant Games has shipped a pretty long string of hits, but the level of production for each one is relatively constant - they're not aiming for "AAA" graphics or scale.
> Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.
Totally true, but at the end of the day you have to convince someone to spend $200,000,000+ on development. You need something concrete to point at as a reason why you'll be successful.
Yeah but you also don't loose the farm if it fails, which let's be real, is the more likely statistical outcome than success , unless you were surrounded by Yes Men who told you how much gamers are gonna love Concord lol and you were dumb enough to believe it because you're a bean counter and not a gamer.
What hurts more, loosing a million dollars of a hundred million?
Game Studios need to learn to be more scrappy and do more small scope projects on tighter Budgets instead of betting the farm on one hit game.
Or, hear me out, you can choose to stop chasing fads that might get outdated in 2-6 years, and actually make something original or make something tried and tested that's low-risk on a small budget.
Gamers are simple people with simple wishes, they just want to have some fun, some escapism for a few hours, and they'll give you money for it. Sony's Astro bot is a clone of Mario64 but it works.
Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.