It's not a zero sum game, however, as players typically buy from a variety of genres (sometimes in the same purchase) and play a large variety of genres over th

It's not a zero sum game, however, as players typically buy from a variety of genres (sometimes in the same purchase) and play a large variety of genres over their lives. It's a bit like saying that Hollywood should never make another romcom because all the blockbusters are superhero movies. While there are some crazy enough in Hollywood to suggest exactly that sort of thing, romcoms aren't generally directly competing for superhero dollars (usually; there are some films that some suggest are superhero romcoms), and exist just fine alongside them. It's not likely for a romcom currently to be considered a blockbuster or to be budgeted or pitched as such, but it's also not impossible, and it certainly doesn't mean that the romcom as a genre is dead because it generally won't be a "summer tentpole blockbuster" any time soon (no matter how much clickbait editorials want to disagree on that). It's probably unlikely for an adventure game to again be that "summer tentpole blockbuster", and I'm of the opinion that they were only "summer tentpole blockbusters" very briefly under the reign of Sierra in part because of the Williams' and Sierra's reign, because they managed to make it so, in budget and in attitude. Now that the blockbusters are FPSes and such, people are still disappointed and generate so much vocal controversy when kickstarters are merely aiming to build "romcoms on a romcom budget" adventure games and can't afford the summer blockbuster spectacle that Sierra did at its peak. That's what I think "killed" the genre and keeps it "dead", far more than the competition with other genres or some "shift in gaming culture". (And yeah, I've seen and reject the arguments that gaming culture as it grew mainstream grew a lot less "intellectual" as the computer and consoles went from being niche things only owned by "smart" people to everyone could own one to everyone did own at least one. First of all, that's just terribly reductive and generally far too dismissive of the average game player. Second of all, there's plenty of evidence the other direction: Ask a hardcore "twitch" gamer some day about minutia in Destiny 2 or Dark Souls or WoW and be prepared for flow charts and long detailed narrative digressions and spreadsheets full of math and raid puzzle solving. Talk to the gamers still pouring hundreds of hours in lovingly complicated simulations like Civilization 6. The "intellectual pursuits" in games never went away; some of it dispersed and migrated and changed shape, a lot of it is still around almost unchanged in some genres like simulation that managed to successfully curb expectations and resize budgets as fashions shifted.)