What Makes a Game Genre Sticky Enough to Influence Everything Else

Most gaming trends fade without leaving much of a mark outside their own genre. Rhythm games had a huge moment, then mostly stayed rhythm games. Tower defense built a loyal following and mostly kept to itself too. But every so often a genre breaks containment entirely, its design language, its visual vocabulary, its core emotional hook start turning up in products that have nothing to do with the original genre at all. Battle royale is the clearest recent example of this happening, and it’