Just some thoughts:
– Offering backward compatibility is a great “we respect you” sign. We change hardware rapidly but we play our games forever. MS obviously has some idea about how backward compatibility makes you stick somewhere.
– Same games over and over and that’s fine. Even outside AAA game development, developers make things they know how to make, they’ll just make it slightly different. Once again yes, games are hard to make so let’s make what we know we can do well! The polish level is high and all over the place. Tons of games look solid. This is good.
– All About Fans. It’s been a couple years like that and I’m not sure how to feel about it. Fans scare me a bit. Their devotion creeps me out a bit. Talking about communities around Hitman or Tom Clancy’s stuff freaks me out a bit. Who are you to obsess so hard over a fictional assassin game that you are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for or spend hundreds of hours on? Doesn’t seem healthy. But yeah, they’re needed (ask Prince about fans sustaining his ass for decades).
– All games land on Windows and all “Personal Computers” at some point. So much that there’s a conference about it. Going back to that backward compatibility, I think it’s huge: I can play any game I have ever played on my current laptop, that’s just awesome. People are starting to notice that. You can play/emulate/use probably 90% of any app ever made on any platform, on Windows. The back catalog is infinite and as nostalgia grows while we age, having one platform to do it all is fantastic.
– EA went from being considered the worst US company to being the one listening and paying attention, in a couple years. Bravo.
– European and Japanese game developers once again demonstrate a stronger aesthetic game than their US friends. Always the same reason: a wider variety of culture available growing up. It’s changing though: US millennials grew up with a wider culture, incorporating international influences.
TL;DR: same old stuff but some signs that things are getting more interesting. And more stable.