Had-to-say wrote...
A niche market is defined as product aimed at satisfying specific market needs. It is usually aimed at a small targeted demographic with a specific need for that product.
I think the average gamer is more into instant gratification. That gamer may not like the deep interaction of a game like Mass Effect. I think Mass Effect has a player base of about 3 million, not bad, but not where I'd like to see it. I think ME is better than 98% of the games available.
Do you think the Mass Effect franchise is too niche, therefore doesn't appeal to common people?
For a game to have so much critical acclaim, it doesn't reach the large bottom base of average gamers. Why is that and how would you fix it?
Two things you need to keep in mind when you are contemplating this topic.
First...
The average gamer is a Myth. He/She does not exist. Not the way it's defined. The gaming industry treats the market as if there's some venn diagram where the center is a giant circle of "Average gamer", surrounded by smaller blobs of "Niche gamers". This is actually false.
The assumption is that the group that bought Call of Duty (Half-Life 2, Final Fantasy 7, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Grand Theft Auto, etc), is some giant group of people out there that will only play some specific type of game. Today it's Call of Duty, in the years past, it was each of those games I listed. They consistently assume that these people are just lurking, unseen, and suddenly some game makes them all pop up.
They then assume normal sales are just "Niche" groups, and the game wasn't "Mainstream enough".
That's not how it actually works.
That "Average gamer" is just the same as the rest of us. He's playing the game he likes. All of those games sold big numbers, not because they tapped the mythical "Average/Casual gamer" market, but because those games were great. It was a perfect storm of word of mouth, combined with a game that hit on all 8 cylinders.
These people buy a game here, and a game there, but they don't just gravitate to one and only one type of game. They play
what looks fun, or what their friends told them was fun. Just like you, me, and everyone else on the board.
The assumption that if you just make a game like X, all of these people are going to suddenly appear, has never worked in the 30 years of video game history. There's never been a case where making your game just like (Insert popular game) has resulted in an enourmous number of sales.
As to why Mass Effect didn't reach the point where it became incredibly popular, it's because the game really isn't all that great. The writing was debatable, and the combat weak in comparison to modern techniques. It was a good game, sure, but it was not a great game. Which leads us to...
Second...
"Critical acclaim" is essentially bought and paid for today.
A gaming website needs advertisers to pay them for banner ads, and it needs people to generate traffic so those ads generate money. People do not give sites revenue, advertisers are their only source of income.
Contrast this to 10 years ago, advertisers paid magazines to buy page space for ads, but people paid them for the magazine. So even without the advertisers, the magazines still generated revenue.
So the only way a site gets money is if a company buys advertising space, and people visit it to read the free content.
So how does a website get people to come? By previews, and timely reviews of games. People go to get the latest information on games, not information weeks or months old.
To get these previews, and timely reviews, advertisers must be willing to let a site see the game early. If the advertisers don't, then people don't come to the site, and the site folds because it's not generating revenue.
So the advertiser is the source of the revenue, and the source of the content. Which means the site is completely dependent on the advertiser. If they make the advertiser mad, the advertiser takes away the means to generate revenue.
Bad reviews and bad previews make advertisers mad.
Hence why big company's games are *always* "Critically acclaimed". The company is paying the bills, so you don't give them bad press.
It's to the point today where if you're the lowest reviewer on metacritic, some companies will "Suggest" you change your score to "Be more inline with everyone else".
So in short, the "Critical acclaim" is completely meaningless. It's essentially like asking a company's marketing department for ratings.
Good article on the subject...
http://www.vg247.com...d-our-way-back/
Retour en haut
.
