There are so many things I think are wrong, both in the OP post itself, and in the included video, that I don't know where to start. I should make an effort and try to get this organized, but my brain is just an avalanche of protest, and I also don't really have the time or motivation to spend on this.
But let's start with the thing that is right: Gamers don't know what they want. Check!
...But, they do know what they don't want! And one of those things is getting something different than they thought they bought!
Game franchises that sell well, don't sell well because they don't “innovate”. They sell well because their mindshare on the market increases, and because they deliver the game that the customers had in mind to get when they bought it.
This is the secret behind CoD and TES sales.
It even works if you dumb down the game, in a way that really isn't much appreciated by the gamers. They will complain slightly about it, but in general they will keep buying the game as long as it's essentially the same game.
Now, changing the game, is a whole other business. What do we mean by changing the game. Well, changing the details in the game that the gamer builds his experience of the game from. The craft and mentality of the game. The art and atmosphere. The reward and satisfaction.
When you do that and release the new game under a well known label, things get rather difficult to judge accurately. It's going to be some kind of disaster, because buyers are not getting what they set out to get. But it's also going to sell reasonably well, by the power of the label. It seems a powerful label, like Dragon Age or Sim City, can collect up to 2 mil sales on the shear momentum of the anticipation.
You don't really see the full damage to the franchise until you try to release a further sequel of the changed game.
Likewise, you don't really see how the game could have been received, on its own merits.
This also applies to moderately changed sequels. That the sequel sells better than the previous, is no confirmation that the changes were well received or resulted in better sales. Rather, if the sales increase is only moderate, I'd say it's a warning signal.
So this is one of the pitfalls when trying to use sales statistics to try to prove anything.
A game mainly sells through mindshare on the market, whether it's good or bad.
Being recognized as a great game, of course increases the mindshare. But being great is no guarantee for good sales. It can just slip in and out, mainly unnoticed. Like actually a few, of the greatest games ever, have done (looking at Vampires: The Masquerade – Bloodlines).
So the lesson is that “Innovation”, in the meaning of completely changing the gameplay to something else, completely changing the art work and atmosphere, completely changing the nature of how rewards and satisfaction is derived from the game, for an existing franchise-label, is never going to work.
That doesn't mean that innovation doesn't work. But if you want to do a new, different game, you should not try to market it with a well known label, no matter how tempting that may be for greedy advertisers.
And since games are business, another lesson is that when you do have something good, that also does well on the market, you should patiently just milk it with uprated, progressively evolved and polished sequels. And just watch their sales grow.
Then you'll have money for “innovative” experiments. Which may result in another successful franchise. Provided the shareholders will let you, of course.
Finally, I'll return to something I've said many times before. The Video Game industry's main problem is that their market is small and isolated. Entertainment software has a huge potential. This potential is not realized because games tend to be aiming for what is perceived as the center of the video game market. There is limited growth potential here. Those huge markets which just sneer at the mere though of wasting time at something like a video game, will never pay it any interest.
To expand out of this little, inbred pool of a market, distilled by the kind of games that are released for it, the industry needs games that sits along the border. Trancending into the realm beyond levels of fast-paced action, endless killing and huge end-bosses. Something different than the old Space Invaders -paradigm. The Sim games and the old cRPG were good examples of this. They brought new people to computer gaming. Not much maybe, but they had the potential. Unfortunately the industry has mainly moved in the opposite direction. Towards the center of "fun", "reactive" etc, with the same old, tired gameplay paradigm. Dragon Age is a typical example. I think DA:Origins sat pretty on the fringe. It was a game you could present to some acquaintances, without shame, and they would get why it might be interesting. No such thing with DA2. I think the problem also stems from the very intentional, and industry driven move towards consoles.
The new generation consoles offer hope there, because they have the memory and CPU-capacity to do games that have something interesting going on. Not just killing.
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