Perhaps because gaming is becoming a lot about spectacle and experience rather than levels?
The point is the difference between the content. If you took something like Mass Effect 2 and reduced it to nothing but the cutscenes, you'd have a movie instead of a game. This is how most trailers for games nowadays depict it, which is the problem.
Here's the official trailer for the latest WoW expansion.
You see those graphics?
That's not what the actual game's graphics are like.
You see that combat?
That's not the combat that's in the actual game.
Notice that nowhere do they show anything from the game. No actual game content is shown, it's all pre-rendered cutscenes. You can't even tell it's an MMO from just the trailer.
The commercials they're showing on TV for the expansion are the same thing. All of them are pre-rendered custscenes, nowhere is the game itself shown.
It's not even a criticism, gameplay is hardly the deciding factor in a game nowadays.
I don't know what sort of planet you live on, but games that have no cutscenes at all are out there, there's thousands of them, and some of them are the best selling games of all time. However even these games, when it comes time for a commercial, present pre-rendered cutscenes (often of things that don't even exist in-game).
They have trailers that show story, trailers that show gameplay, trailers that show every little aspect about a game. I really think trailers are better and more diverse than ever before.
I don't know what sort of trailers you've seen, but
that's false, which is the point of this thread. The majority (by far) of trailers nowadays focus on cutscenes and little to no explanation of what the game actually is. In fact there's some major ones out there that show
nothing from the actual game itself,
- What if movie commercials never showed anything from the movie?
- What if a vacuum commercial never actually showed the vacuum?
- What if a Wendy's commercial never actually showed any of the food?
- What if a commercial for a training program never showed any of the training, or any people that had taken the course?
All this shit would be stupid, right? Borderline false advertising? But no, AAA/console game devs do it, so it's fine...
That's the problem. Accepting this sort of stupid decisions because it's what other companies do?
That's stagnation.