There are a couple of things that do really well when it comes to sales.

1. Sex
2. Violence

Majority of videos games these days have a mixture of both elements. These things sell, developers know this and exploit it.

That being said, I am a gamer and I play almost every kind of video game and I enjoy them with or without violence. However some of my favorite games are very violent. Just how it is.

-SAP-

While I am guilty of getting into Call of Duty since the second or third title, I do miss the sheer fun of mastering the methods of the games of yesteryear. I am only getting to age 30 now, and never got to experience the Atari, Commodore or pinball craze days.

Though, I remember my start in gaming was having an old PC (which was primarily a word processor) in my room during my formative years. Back when the screens were black background with orange text - no color, no high def. My dad was a programmer and taught me DOS and Visual Basic. The first games I created were text based like Oregon trail, but I remember playing games like Tapper and Beowulf and loving the heck out of them. Ever since I've loved gaming.

While I do tend to go with the crowd in the popular games now that multiplayer is more commonplace than ever, I do try to find games that feed my raving for the epic journey more than just constant killing. I saw the shadow of colossus mentioned above as well as Ico. I've been meaning to pick those two up as they seem to scratch the same itch that Final Fantasy 7 did for me when I was in High school.

To me the hero journey games are the best.

People here are saying that shooters desensitize children to killing. I disagree. FPS games are NOTHING like holding a real gun and ending someone's life with it. I've been playing FPS games for quite a bit of time. I still will not kill any living creature, unless I must. In fact, I even have a conscience in video games. Pretty weird, right?