Nintendo is kind of the exception to the rule though. By the very nature of a game being a Nintendo game they can put out new IP and get a lot of attention organically. They can also pin it to the top of their storefront or, in the old days, force retailers to carry it and promote it.
If you are average publisher you have none of those options, so you have to either sell your game on merit or on following trends. Unfortunately most publishers choose the later as it is more perdictable.
It would seem to be the opposite in practice, though. All the major publishers who should be able to push a weird and experimental game by the cachet of their brand alone just end up making safe and derivative games. And then because indie devs don't have the funding to compete with AAA studios in the space of safe and derivative games, no-name companies end up making all the weird and experimental games.
If you're the CEO of a AAA game studio, you really just need to have a handful of tiny two-person in-house teams where you just give them 1/10,000th the budget of the most recent Far Cry 516 and tell them to make something weird.
Kind of a side tangent, but yes. I am baffled by the AAA game publishers. It is not just that they are making safe bets, it is that they cannot execute upon them to save their life. The games are objectively bad.
Every once in awhile they buy a studio and it remains uncorupted for awhile, but slowly but surely they lose their ability to make games that are fun.
AAA games before launch can be seen as high-risk speculative assets. The game gets a few rounds of investment and then when it's still not done, they go begging. Sometimes one publisher pawns the game off onto another, but internal politics equally acts to create horse-trading situations. There are attempts at cost control but they get overridden by the desire to hit every possible marketing bullet point. As the budget creeps up the desire to make back sunk costs rises, so further escalation acts as a way to stop cancellation. There's a lot of executive hot potato causing design changes, but the team's getting funding. So, in theory, at least, the game is shaping up to be "bigger and better".
Finally, the game launches, after passing through so many hands and getting a drop-dead deadline. Crunch is mandated in hopes of getting it somewhat release-worthy, but really, it's just a pile of assets that have been given little time in the oven. Reviewers marvel at the graphics and animation. Individual pieces of the game are polished to hell. The engineers get to give talks about their cool rendering optimization strategy, and the art directors and design leads likewise can talk about how they made art style or design decisions. But it's not representative of a holistic vision - it's enterprise software.
When a studio is bought, it often starts from a point of some coherence. And then the horse trading starts, and the original studio heads leave. So it just becomes another team. And it's hard to avoid that because the whole idea of AAA is to build up the assets and IP, not the teams and their ability to execute. You sacrifice the teams to get an IP, and then find a new team.
If you are average publisher you have none of those options, so you have to either sell your game on merit or on following trends. Unfortunately most publishers choose the later as it is more perdictable.