Video games have more sequelitis than ever. Here's why
My live reporting notes from Summer Game Fest in Hollywood
The video game industry has seen an increase in revenue in 2026 so far, compared to last year. But the prevailing mood, thanks to highly visible layoffs and studio closures, can be grim.
That wasn’t present today at Summer Game Fest that I attended at Dolby Theater in Hollywood, where a nearly packed theater of gamers cheered for appearances by Snoop Dogg, voice actor Ben Starr, and Billy the Puppet from Saw. Sounds of extreme excitement and hype could be heard throughout the theater, which seats over three thousand, and is notably much smaller than The Game Awards, which seats seven thousand. Still, taking a close look at the 2026 and 2027 line-up of blockbuster games is a true window into studios’ risk-adverse psyches during this economically turbulent time.
While Summer Game Fest is a smaller showing than the historic and now-defunct Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), there were still plenty of massive announcements aimed at eager fans. Excitement bubbled up over a potential Cyberpunk anime RPG, but died down once fans realized it was just a Wuthering Waves x Cyberpunk collab. While fans did call out for a Grand Theft Auto 6 teaser, there was no word from Take-Two games, and instead, the largest piece of news from the night was Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the final installment in the series. We saw several trailers of Revelation, showing us fan favorites Vincent and Cid as playable characters, a new and exciting sky-diving way of getting around town, and cute outfits for Tifa, which also got considerable whoops and hollers.
Like a well-oiled machine, the news show only gave us sure-fire hits. Street Fighter 6 is adding the extremely popular Tifa and the Final Fantasy materia system to the game, although a demo of how it’ll work wasn’t immediately available today. Someone in the audience groaned audibly at the lack of a demo, to some amount of laughter. Sonic Racing: Crossworlds is getting all manner of collabs just in time for Sonic’s 35th anniversary, but the one people are most excited about is fittingly Evangelion. Stellar Blade has been successful enough to justify a sequel called Blood Rain, featuring a different protagonist who looks notably younger than the original one.
Former Naughty Dog developers at That’s No Moon studio are making a game that looks reminiscent of The Last of Us, called Crossfire, featuring some witty banter and put-downs between the two operators forming a temporary alliance. A new Saw game with 3 v.1 multiplayer online feels like it can give Dead by Daylight 2 players something new to chew on.
Taking this all in, I was hit by a feeling of deja vu. In 2019, I attended the last in-person E3, and wrote this story for CNN about gaming’s tendency to lean on sequels. Back then, analysts told me that new intellectual property tended not to sell as well as sequels.
Now, in a rapidly-consolidating industry, these trends seem to be accelerating even more apparently at today’s Summer Game Fest. Attack on Titan is onto its third entry. Telltale is back with a The Wolf Among Us 2. It’s clear that the established hits are just going to keep on coming, as studios keep adding entries to their known cash cows. Look no further than today’s biggest announcement to see the cyclical nature of video games. The FF7 Remake launched in 2020 and has sold millions of copies so far. The original 1997 Final Fantasy VII surpassed 15 million units worldwide. And while we didn’t get a new Pokemon game announcement today, a similar game that is being sued by Nintendo for copyright infringement, Palworld, announced it would be leaving its testing phase as of July and launching its official first version.
The strategy of making beloved sequels still has its pitfalls, as explained back in 2020, by Rod Fergusson, then-studio head of Gears’ developer The Coalition who told me that sequels had to walk the line between being too derivative and being too experimental: “You have to find this middle ground, which is you take the betrayal of expectations and turn it into surprise and delight.”
Another cause of the sequelitis is the prevalence of social media. If one whisper about a new Virtua Fighter game can go viral, analysts noted, companies could save millions on marketing costs. (One example that comes to mind here is the massive, splashy campaign behind relatively new-IP Stellar Blade, including full billboard ads.)
I’m here in Los Angeles all throughout the weekend, and diving back through my reporter’s notebook on various newsletter drafts that didn’t see the light of day for whatever reason. Please do say hello if you see me in the crowd wearing a video games blue baseball cap. And I’ll have more to share very soon after this weekend’s meetings.