I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD,

I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD, Battlefield, and Fortnight have called their games platforms. Riot is doing something kind of similar with funding indie studious to build on their tech and IP. What they generally mean is that they're moving away from releasing new games/versions every N years and instead continuously updating a single release with new content, modes, and so on. From a product perspective, this makes a lot sense to me. We're past the era when new releases diverge significantly from their past versions. This approach of continuously updating an existing game has already been happening for a while with Fortnight and CoD, and it's led to a lot of variety with much less friction to getting the new experience. From an economic perspective, I assume it's a lot cheaper to develop updates than new releases, and a lot of them can monetize with cosmetics. If we're doing platforms, I'd love to see modding culture make a big comeback this way - more of what Roblox is doing, but with something aimed at adults. The old days of Halflife and Warcraft 3 mods were so huge in my childhood, and I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity by these studios not to tap into this more.