I guess you are right: Too much of the same thing is never healty. I think for 'core' games it got really problematic as soon as the big players started streamlinging their products instead of trying to improve them or even change them (if not create something entirely new!). Merely removing or simplyfing features in a neverending sequelitis is never a good idea.

But this is also happening with a lot of casual games, which do a lot of recycling themselves (like creating 'new' games by bringing the game graphics up to date or adding an in-game story).

There is certainly some merit to flawless productions in the 'more of the same' vein. They can be quite entertaining at times. Though they tend to become lost within themselves; just look at how basically a whole new language was created around those games. When people seriously start getting into discussions about artificial terms like 'bullet time', you know that this is not healthy anymore.

Not that terms like 'free to play' are any better. In general, I would say that it's never a good sign if marketing terms start being used by the 'independent' press.

If there is one thing I really hate about the neo-casual games created by the larger corporations, it is that they are designed to be addcitive (in the true sense of the word). Most of them consist of horribly mindless buttonpressing (or screenwiping) in order to get 'fed' by achievments, which have absolutely no meaning. And while they are 'free' to play, they cost you a lot of time which would be better spend by looking at your wallpaper. That is unless you pay to get some extra equipemnt and shorten that time. Isn't it quite absurd, that you have to pay to keep you from playing those timewasters?

Actually I prefer the professional products of the 90ies and 00ies to the new 'casual'-games, for while they might have lacked originality in game design, they had high production values, you paid for what you got and there was almost no nonsense like last minute cut-out game content sold as DLC. And sometimes a good story might have made you think, like a good book or a decent film. Sometimes you might have been challegend by the game, might have used a manual or spend some time on trying to figure out how the game actually worked... without a pop up to remind you that you just learned to step forward. Never thought I would miss buttons without tooltips so much...

But still it's good to see some halfway independent developers getting some attention and creating some original (or at least less mainstream/common denominator) games for gamers and not for a "market".

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