In my mind competition is supposed to spur on creativity because you essentially can not keep doing the same thing you've been doing to be successful. It's a very simple definition, for the sake of this topic, and yet it still comes up short when I see this video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILgxeNBK_8 (I tried embeding the video below. It shows up in "preview" but not when I sumbmit post. Why is this not easier to do? Am I missing something?)
I want to get your thoughts on how this applies to the game industry at hand. Most companies compete with each other on similar grounds, and intentionally so they can increase sales. New games, of all genres (think Shooter games, especially) are generally very similar to one another as a way to increase sales and minimize risk. This may be very obvious to us on some level, but how the heck can we incentivize creativity if competition and money won't even do it?
Even if you stray too far from what the main stream likes (setting up shop not in the middle of the beach, like in the video), and are successful, the competitor will simply change their next product to be somewhat closer to you product so that they still eat up your sales and get the mainstream market as well (again just setting up shop a little closer to you).
