People are very much creatures of habit and that’s why things like sequels exist. Then on top of that there’s recurring games, to the point of being released every year as long as possible. It doesn’t always start that way but games tend to get that way after a while if they sell a bunch. And sometimes that means a significant drop in quality or differences between games, unless there’s some way of having multiple teams work on each next thing and so on. However I’m just talking about the games themselves this time.
When it comes to annual release series, there’s two major ones that come to mind, at least mine, namely Call of Duty and Madden football games from EA. The difference is that I’ve played more Call of Duty games than Madden, and that really comes down to me not really being into sports games. I see the Call of Duty games as more like action movies, and therefore I wait until they get very cheap used before I get any I’m interested in. For me to be interested in one, I have to want to play the campaign, which means something like Black Ops 4 (or IIII apparently) is off the list, and I had to wait a while before I could play Black Ops 3 on PS4 since last-gen only lacked the campaign as well. Also, I was concerned they would completely abandon the campaign idea, but not very, since I have a lot of other games, but it was more because they were getting more interesting stories, even with their clichés and the settings getting further out there and even into space as it went to the future. I was enjoying what the other people weren’t, especially since most just tend to go straight to multiplayer and that’s even what gets installed first for that reason.
As well as Madden for sports annual stuff, there’s another one in the back of my mind, and that’s FIFA. Particularly this one stands out because for whatever reason, EA tends to just stop caring about the Nintendo versions after the initial couple and just go into “legacy mode” where it’s practically literally the same game as the previous year with a roster update, pretty much consolidating down what I think the games do mostly, outside of things like their story mode or the card game, and maybe one of those also gets into the Nintendo version.
Now with other games falling into annual releases, I sometimes wonder where they land on the roughly defined scale between Call of Duty and Madden, or even something like the “legacy” FIFA thing, but that applies more to cross-generation things. Maybe I might play Pokémon Sword someday, or whatever succeeds it directly, but most likely I’d end up borrowing it if I could instead of paying like $5-10 or whatever because that may be unlikely given the whole Nintendo game thing. I just haven’t been into Pokémon games much since after beating Moon, but character designs are another topic.