coalton.ross, I don't agree with you. There always will be pop culture and easy products for masses, and it's not bad. I alk abou POINT OF VIEW. When I was 15, had an old PC which can't run new games, and didn' read game magazines. I tried games because the were GAMES. And my school friends, who had no PC and came to me. We laughed on Lesure Suit Larry. We tried to fuck a girl in The Sims. And now everybody knows that Sims and quests are for girls.
Spacesims? Hardcore wargames? Magic Cartep simulator? Pirate RPG? Years ago I would be excited only with idea of them. And now I play what I hear about - Deus Ex, Dishonored, AC, CoD,DmC, FarCry, Borderlands... Good gameplay, good graphics, good (smoetimes) story, easy-to-use and lots of fun. I forgot when I played RTS last time.
But which boy didn't want to be a space pilot, or a pirate, or a space pirate? Or be a magician, or a battleship captain, or a thousand-man army commander? Why don't that boys or ex-boys play games which give them this ability?

Why did The Secret World fail? It has REALY ineresting world, good story, unique quests, familiar WoW gameplay... So why???

I don't think that the video game magazines are to blame. I think the people that choose to buy uninspired sequels or copied formulas of successful games such as COD, WOW and DOTA are to blame. There are always going to be people that just want the new "fix" in something, just like you have a guaranteed random action movie or random romantic comedy come out in movies and make millions of dollars despite being creatively shallow. Just like you have pop music selling off of a catchy hook and not actual interesting or worthwhile music composition. There are differences in games though since games are an interactive medium, so that's one reason I don't often trust reviews or metacritic scores before I play games. What may be fun and fulfilling to one person, or even many other people, may not be fun to me.

I think, videogame magazines are blame. They discribe games as entertaining PRODUCTS, not as WONDERFUL WORLDS.

When one buys WORLD, he looks for unexpectable things and new experiense, which guarantees impressions. When one buys after-work-evening entertainment, he looks for something simple and familiar, which garantees fun.

When people talk about stories, it's good to have an unique story. When people talk about entertainment, it's good to be in trend.

10 years ago I had Pentium-166 and hardly could find games for it. I bought "Knights and Merchants". I knew NOTHING about RTS, I wanted to TRY. And it was WONDERFUL!!! And everybody who played the game - it was boys, who liked shooters and RPG's - was excited. And I know that if I read about this game in some magazine, I wouldn't buy it. Bad graphics, bad enemies AI, weak battle gameplay, 8 types of units, no difference between different sides, no RPG elements, complex economic system... BORING! But the game wsa EXCELENT!!! It feeled light and easy, as iPad games, but deep and long, as other PC strategies.

And it's bad system: journalist trys to be objective, and we get speric review in vacuum and can't FEEL the game. Can't understand, what is it about. Does it fit to us. So we can only trust well-known genres and 8's and 10's on Metacritic.