wonderful to see people using those two games as an example of how stale the gaming industy is for the five millionth time, congratulations.
i'm not saying it's wrong, it's just old and really not extremely valid. there are plenty of other games and the vast majority of successful ones aren't exactly like CoD or Minecraft. i honestly know of no Minecraft-like games that are worth talking about. there are tons of FPS games, but 'FPS' is pretty vague and lots of these are different. the problem really is that these games are getting more attention because the companies making them A) have the funds to promote them any way they want B) are already well-known or are using well-known publishers C) know they can get away with putting out cliches
you're complaining about something that's pretty trivial
...also voxel-type engines have some benefits over other polygon-based ones for certain types of games. of course you can smooth the voxels.
