Want to revive arena shooters? Easy. Make them actually look cool and appealing. All these newer arena shooters look kinda boring and ugly. They do not attract a potential new audience to AFPS whatsoever. Faceless scifi marines and weird robot balls; every arena shooter looks like some grey, aimless mish-mash of sci-fi movies. Blegh

You fags go on and on about how AFPS gameplay is too intense/difficult/etc. for the modern audience. You need to understand that people are willing to play the most unfair, mtx-infested, completely miserable, shit mobile 'games', specifically because they want to win some pretty character. Seriously, some sex-appeal wouldn't hurt. You think Overwatch would have gotten as big without those character designs? Remember that Tracer ass controversy? That's marketing 101

Even a gameplay-purist genre like AFPS needs visual appeal. Fighting games and shmups are niche tryhard genres too, but they still garner a little more interest because they look stylish and fun to play. It's how you reel an audience in; sure a lot of them will get 'filtered' anyway but there will always be some interested enough to get actually invested in the genre. AFPS will always be niche, but it could certainly be less dead.

Take Quake/UT, give it some recognisable aesthetic, slap some pretty anime girls on it. Add some cosmetic mtx bullshit like CSGO. Add a story mode for the casuals. Keep both matchmaking and a server browser. And most importantly, give it a modest price-tag, (there is nothing more off-putting than some ludicrous 70 quid AAA price for this type of game)
BOOM! AFPS revived, thank me later.