MMOs, MOBAs and Over Saturation of Genres

It seems that everyone wants a piece of the pie, when it's already stale and what's left are basically left overs. World of Warcraft was massively successful, and then came Rift, The Old Republic, DC Universe Online, and so on. League of Legends led the MOBA free to play market. The FPS boom, RTS era, indie platformers of recent times; games of the same genre tend to follow after a particularly successful game.

This method of jumping on their bandwagon might have worked in the past with the traditional purchase-once-and-play payment model. This is especially true with single player games with fans looking for similar experience on completing a game. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with free-to-play games and MMO due to their persistent nature. Gamers can't possibly carry their character or progress to a totally new game, can they? And if they have pumped money into their game, then it's even less likely for them to switch. Even competitive FPS titles of this generation have a levelling system so gamers are encouraged to stick to a single game, or risk losing all the progress they have made.

Why are companies willing to spend money developing something that is already on the market, and, more often than not, already holds most of the market share? What ends up being released, tends not to differ enough as not to be considered a clone of the first game, fighting for the very people who are invested in the first game. Try as I might, I can't think of a reason. What we've seen in the case of MOBAs is companies like Blizzard trying to differentiate themselves by catering to casual players; other games like Smite and Awesomenauts mixed things up by changing the perspective or even 3D to 2D. Considering the hype behind Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm, perhaps targeting a different audience is the key?

What we gamers get, though, is games with different twists, and possibly, merging of genres resulting in new and innovative game play while outright clones are most likely just going to die out. Competition is always good, as been said on this blog multiple times, so if companies are willing to throw their money away, I guess I'm not going to complain. Well, not too much.