8 Popular Video Games The Industry Doesn’t Make Anymore

2. Open-World Crime Sandboxes

Y'know what's really weird?

For the first generation since its inception, Rockstar backed off releasing GTA games every couple of years in the eighth console cycle, and nobody stepped in to even try and take their crown.

Where Saints Row's all-out crazy approach peaked with Saints 3 and 4, and Sleeping Dogs brought in Arkham Asylum's combat model to make one of the most cherished open-world crime games ever, that was about it.

After a while it's as though most developers resigned themselves to the fact that consumers interested in open-world crime titles would just play GTA Online, and stopped trying to get in the way.

Even Rockstar themselves sat on their laurels for five years, eventually releasing Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, while Saints Row also backed off, Sleeping Dogs' sequel was canned, and Mafia 3 swung and missed in bringing all those latent fans to its side of the fence.

Open-world design goals shifted, "the Ubisoft formula" took hold, and it's not been til Zelda: Breath of the Wild overhauled that in 2017, that we're seeing another change of the guard, with The Pathless and Immortals: Fenyx Rising doing away with endless icon lists and towers to clear out.

Can a new crime game mould itself to this freer template, or is GTA just too big a contender, for anyone else to step in the ring?