“even you have to agree that the “brown tones FPS shooter” is HIGHLY represented in this gen”

Obviously, they are highly represented. People who hate the genre can easily ignore them. Even military shooter fanatics don’t want to play half the military shooters coming out, but there is never too much choice.

Also, I think there’s a pretty distinct difference between improvment and innovation as well, but that’s not to say that they don’t compliment each other. In terms of gaming, I think it’s more along the lines of playing something new that feels familiar or playing something new that feels completely different. In the former, most games still have that familiar feel, but they often build upon and improve previous gaming formulas and the like, but are not necessarily innovative. The latter is a different story. A new genre of games are often started by a completely new idea, and those completely new ideas are what are considered innovative.

When Battlefield 1942 came out, that was innovative. No other game mixed in multiplayer first person shooters with the sheer variety of vehicles to control on that scale. Every Battlefield since that has simply been an improvement over the old BF42 formula, and not really revolutionary/innovative.

Oftentimes, sequels are not going to be very innovative anyway. If you’re going to make a sequel to a game, you want it to feel at least a little familiar to appease the fans of the original title. LittleBigPlanet 2, though adding a lot of new tools and abilities, isn’t as innovative as the first title was (created levels, on the other hand, can still be very innovative), but it is an improvement over the original. LBP brought to the table the ability to create your own stuff with tools not found in any other game. Sure, the gameplay itself is a take on the platforming genre, but if you’re only going to look at LBP as a platforming title, you aren’t doing it justice.

With that said, there aren’t too many truly innovative titles. Most developers still rely on tried and true formulas for building a game, because doing something different is a risk that might not necessarily pan out in the end. Who usually makes those risks, though? It’s mostly your independent developers. The ones you’d expect to not want to take risks because they have more to lose. thatgamecompany, the guys behind Flower and flOw, created games that feel completely different from games we’ve played before, mainly in the way they controlled. On paper, the games don’t sound like anything anyone would want to play, but because they were so different, people, I guess you can say, fell in love with them, despite how simplistic they actually were.

So I think there is definitely a distinction between the two.

Also, to point out, you need to specify whether you’re talking about gameplay, story, etc, because a lot of those can be a mixture of innovation and improvement. Assassin’s Creed, for instance, had an innovative story, but the gameplay was more or less an improvement on the third person action title.