Please make 2019 the year we stop making battle royale games

New years are, for the first 24 hours at least, all about making resolutions: promises of better behaviour in the future, of achievements we hope to attain. With that in mind, can the game industry please make ‘no more battle royale’ its new year’s resolution? Because I am so, so sick of it. Back in 2010 I read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and it quickly became a firm favourite. Part of the reason for this was that it showed that forcing children to fight to the last kid standing was a concept that could be successfully explored in different ways. Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale may have been the first book to deal with the idea, but The Hunger Games proved it wasn’t the only version of this harrowing scenario with merit. It’s an approach that applies to videogames as much as any medium. The battle royale concept is a great idea (I’d always wanted an interactive version of Takami and Collins’ nightmarish futures), and there’s creative space for several interpretations of the same idea. But the videogame industry is throttling the life out of the genre: it’s cynically cashing in on the phenomenon, with many developers offering little to no innovation.