Capitalists love to brag about how inventive the market economy is. The impetus of survival in competitive environments, an advocate might say, has led to an amazing acceleration of scientific and cultural advancement.

That capitalism has overseen a huge technological leap is hard to disagree with — though precisely how is contested.

The cultural claim, however, seems increasingly undermined as a relatively small range of stories dominate and endlessly repeat through mass consumption. The games industry being a standout example of this.

While a large groundswell of independent development does exist, and sometimes includes genuinely intelligent new thinking, the biggest games in the world are all numbered and tend to monopolise individual genres.

Grand Theft Auto 5, the various manifestations of Call of Duty or Battlefield, Starcraft III, World Of Warcraft’s many colons — any gamer can tell you the list that hasn’t markedly changed in years.

Because these titles dominate their fields they tend to warp the kind of thinking that goes into games production more generally, dividing it into themes, which change only slowly, if at all.

Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Victoriana, sci-fi and fantasy games are all drawn from a surprisingly restricted template of tropes and it’s very rare to find storylines, let alone sets of game mechanics, which genuinely pull in new directions.

And in this, capitalism is directly to blame. Specifically its need for profit.

Top tier games-making is an expensive venture requiring highly-skilled workers. As with movies, the single biggest pressure is whether your game can make not just enough to get by but profits, which run into the millions.

And the impact of this — the elephant in the room that capitalists don’t like to talk about — is to retard imagination and flatline philosophical ambition.

Such firms don’t make up their own “disruptive” games to test at market, instead mostly relying on gobbling up proven successes coming from undefended start-ups and a leading edge of freethinking modders, whose innovative rebuilds of old games recently gave us lane chasers — now a huge business with giant audiences for games like Dota2 and League of Legends — and the survival RPG genre.

A stand-out example of just how bad things got was the release of Bungie’s sci-fi epic Destiny last year.

It was described as “groundbreaking” and “a huge risk for the company” due to the sheer size of its launch.

But the reality is there was little groundbreaking about it. Bungie put together a weak, cliched plotline to go with mechanics mostly lifted from a title they’d made before, Halo.

The “unique selling point” was that they had added accoutrements from mass role playing games such as upgradable characters and multiplayer “instances” — all well tested, profitable formulas.

The risk in managers’ minds came from two sources. First, that they’d made a game mashing together two known genres rather than sticking rigidly to their previous form, and second, that they weren’t selling a Known Universe — one already well known to punters from previous excursions.

This is a real fear even for firms of Bungie’s heft — a curb on even minor changes to the script, which was highlighted as part of a wider problem for media of all kinds last year by graphic novelist Alan Moore.

Moore complained that highly capitalised superhero characters — Superman, Batman, the Avengers, etc — are “the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage,” burying alternative ideas beneath a tidal wave of hype and commercial PR.

He argued that these enormous franchises have become all-important to the commercial models of media giants, which latched on to a highly efficient process perfected by comic firms — the build, crossover and reboot.

First, a new series is launched within the company’s broader “canon” universe. Based on the interest of established audiences it becomes popular and its characters are then fully exploited in complex plot arcs.

Over time, the character’s expanding backstory leads to interactions with numerous other works, building to major crossovers and travels through time/dimensions, which lengthen the backstories until their various expanded universes become impossible to remember or follow.

Then comes the reboot. All complex aspects of the backstory are wiped bar a few key pointers — the death of Batman’s parents, the destruction of Krypton — and the cycle begins again.

In comics this has happened in series such as Marvel’s Secret Wars or DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In Star Wars, the enormous Expanded Universe was famously discounted as canon last year by Time Warner. The firm that owns the story decreed that millions of words written between 1970 and 2014, the videos, games, artworks and toys were essentially meaningless.

This allows companies to simply start the cycle of profit all over again with a new generation, knowing that the formula can make them money.

Gaming is yet to have many canonic clearouts with its own heavyweight titles — Lara Croft is probably the most notable — primarily because the storylines have mostly not been terribly complex and haven’t produced many iconic in-depth works about famous characters.

It seems likely this lifespan-extending necessity will only be a matter of time however, particularly for the ludicrously convoluted World of Warcraft and, in the meantime, there’s always remakes for the nostalgia crowd.

While big firms continue this cycle of creative inertia, most of the really exciting ideas continue to come from amateurs and hobbyists, who throw weird and wonderful mechanics into the pot for free via mods. Case of capitalism exploiting the inventiveness of the commons.