Theory of Mean-field games is widely considered one of the major milestones for the theoretical development of N-players games. However, it requires the homogeneity condition and analyzes only the asymptotic behavior of N going to infinity. In this talk we will present a new paradigm for dynamic N-player non-cooperative games called alpha-potential games, where the change of a player's value function upon unilateral deviation from her strategy is equal to the change of an alpha-potential function up to an error alpha. This game framework is shown to reduce the challenging task of finding alpha-Nash equilibria for a dynamic game to minimizing the associated alpha-potential function. The latter is then shown to be a conditional McKean--Vlasov control problem. In such games, analysis of alpha reveals critical game
characteristics, including choices of admissible strategies, the intensity of interactions, and the level of heterogeneity among players. We will discuss through simple examples some recent theoretical developments,  along with a few open problems for this new game framework.