[Tracker]

I totally agree with Smiling Spectre on this - mainstreamism is all about feeding people with what they consume the most, even if that is not necessarily good. Good sounds like a subjective term, but it has it's objective approaches.
The problem with franchises is, that they repeat the same thing over and over again, if you have never played a Call of Duty game before, you can't tell apart Call of Duty 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8, there's just no difference between them except the story.
And by the way, new games aren't that challanging either, not to mention the shallow storylines (though they evolved from Doom 2's "kill everyone because f...k you that's why" to class C hollywood action movies) - those indicators telling you what to do, when to do, how to do, like the entire game was one big tutorial - can't they just let the players be creative and find their own solutions? Oh, that needs parallel storylines and alternate endings and such, which means more work.
And to agree with jonh_sabugs, current technology is totally unexplored - either 80s and 90s developers were more willing to take risks and did more experiments or they were just more creative. Think about it, games like Maniac Mansion, Wolfenstein 3D, Super Mario, or Final Fantasy set standards by doing what at that time no one ever thought of writing - we can't really see this much of curiousity in developres outside the indie scene with their weirdo games. Publishers simply won't risk handing out cash to someone who wants to make a game about something new.

What the industry needs is publishers growing balls and turning away from the childish demands of the soulles 12 year old MMORPG and FPS scene, giving the chance to inidi devs to write classics.