It's not surprising to me.

The reason some of the most popular games are popular isn't because they are fun, it's because they've built an esports industry. Those popular games get spectators which in turn makes the games more popular.

There are simply too many games, and many genres are underserved by AAA studios.

Strange things are happening regarding genres served by AAA studios. Some of them come and go fairly quickly. There was a brief resurgence of strategy(!!) games because of XCOM.

AAA run to the formula that works as a safe bet, when they want risk they just borrow an existing concept and sell it harder.

Well yes.

The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.

Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.

On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.

Let us say Star Wars. Until someone has a daughter and suddenly found out there is no nothing between them and then he should we say now we have one then very annoying girl Jedi forced onto the team.

This apparently is something that came about after the Atari days where games were social activities in bars and home console advertising features boys and girls. When the NES came out, it was marketed in the US as a toy so had to mold itself to the retail store layouts and pick a toy aisle and they picked boys. In the mobile era and perhaps as early as The Sims beating MYST as the bestselling game, started to develop a more balanced marketing approach.

That sounded outlandish so I asked Gemini for a citation:

https://www.mindlessmag.com/post/a-boy-s-hobby-gender-and-ma...

Another reference, first hand account, for the later SEGA perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(book)

Video games are a dead concept. Meanwhile companies like Wizards of the Coast are making billions on paper trading card games.