Hi-Rez CEO: There Are No More "Pure, Creative Thoughts" In Gaming Any More

In discussing Paladins Battlegrounds in the latest F2P Cast, we opined that Hi-Rez Studios is the type of company that tends to take what's been done before and put their own twist on it, whether that be a MOBA, hero shooter, or CCG. It appears that the top man at the company feels the same way.

In an interview with PCGamesN, Hi-Rez CEO Erez Goren says that his company always tries to be original and "put our own spin on games, whether the community believes it or not," but he understands that, as the saying goes, there's nothing really new under the sun. "All the games are kinds of iterations of some other creative input" and he doesn't believe that there are "any pure, creative thoughts that you can’t find in any game right now."

He's right, for the most part. While there are the occasional breakthrough games, like Minecraft or DayZ, nearly every successful game bears some (and often great) resemblance to what came before. I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley and Path of Exile lately, and -- great as those games are -- they're hardly the first farming simulator or ARPG ever. The question is whether your game can do something better than similar games that came before and find an audience. With a "yes," you get Overwatch. With a "no," you get LawBreakers.

Nobody really knows yet how things will go with Paladins Battlegrounds. We might all be snickering at it a bit now, but we snickered at Fortnite Battle Royale, too -- and heck, even Paladins itself -- and how did all that turn out?

Naturally, Goren goes on to say that Paladins Battlegrounds "doesn’t feel like those games [PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite], it feels like a different version of that, but for our audience it should be something that complements the game very well." So it's the same, but different, which is, admittedly, a spin that nearly every company puts on its games these days.