The biggest problem I have with Zynga is that they do not have any creativity. The games they churn out are just another [insert random noun]'ville or a ripoff of a popular existing game (scrabble, hang man, poker, etc). A video game's shelf life doesn't usually last for more than 12 months, and if they can't come up with any unique new product that can capture the attention of a mass number of users they may be up a certain creek without a paddle.
A video game's shelf life doesn't usually last for more than 12 months
This compares rather favorably to the video game industry, where exponential sales decay sets in after 1 to 3 weeks for almost all titles, including ones which cost more to produce than every Zynga game produced to date combined.
I don't love Zynga, but their model has a lot to recommend it over "Lets make another big-budget war movie/game with $10 million of programming, $80 million of art assets, and $120 million of launch marketing and then try to get it in front of every 18 ~ 30 year old male in America."
The wii is a great example of a system that everyone has and nobody plays.
I can't count the number of times I've visited people's houses with the wii unused. All the casual gamers Nintendo attracted won't be buying another system again.
This is endemic of the games industry as a whole. SW:TOR is just World of Warcraft with lightsabers. Modern Warfare 3 is an expansion packaged as a sequel. Angry Birds is just Castle Crashers with a different firing mechanic. We've become so efficient at extracting money out of the hits, it becomes hard to truly innovate.
While I agree that there is a lack of major innovation in the video games industry and there is a problem with most gamers just waiting for the next AAA title from a major publisher, I think your examples are all flawed.
SW:TOR is definitely World of Warcraft with a Star Wars skin. It also has the most voice acting of any game in history and it is the first MMOs that actually has a story for each player character that is worth following.
Modern Warfare 3 as an expansion is now arguing semantics. What makes it an expansion? Two years of development where they didn't really innovate but they continued to tightly tune their well oiled machine and CoD Elite is a great platform that almost every game would benefit from. Is it simply price you are annoyed with because you don't perceive the incremental improvements to be worth it? Modern Warfare 3 is definitely not going to push the video games industry forward in any major ways but Modern Warfare 1 & 2 have already done that.
As another poster has stated you're confusing Castle Crashers with something else. Castle Crashers is more like Battletoads or Double Dragon or River City Ransom.
The "hardcare" video game industry is moving forward albeit slowly. The "social" video game industry seems to have stagnated already and is just rehashing their current game mechanics with new graphics.
I think you are confusing Castle Crashers with some other game. Castle Crashers is and old-school beat them up with very nice art.
Also, the problem you describe exists in all entertainment industries. I don't think we've innovated much in literature since Shakespeare or in cinema since Hitchcock. But there's always some work that stand above the rest in their originality. And then a lot of other works that improve on them or at least try. I don't think that's bad.
I think you (any many other commentors) have touched on part of a problem. It's not the lack of creativity per se, and not entirely related to the whole oh X is just Y with one new gimmick/game mechanic and different graphics.
Rather, Zynga's game development is heavily metrics driven. They can tune their games to max out metrics, and make them stupidly addicting, and 'fun' and get their customers. But in general, you really cannot create 'new' or 'innovative', or at least in the way people like those words to mean by following the metrics. You can just create more and more polished and targeted variants of existing games.
