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[Yalision]

According to many press websites these are our certain figures. Now lets look at real numbers and talk about what it means to be a vocal minority and take a loot at what we are actually seeing compared to what we think we are seeing. This vocal minority mess is just too amusing now to dabble in, and I mean that for all parties involved.

About 3.5 million copies of Mass Effect 3 have been shipped world wide.

Day one sales have been reported to sit around 800k.

Other than that, we have no numbers to go by. Unless one takes a peek at VGChartz, you have no other rough estimates of physical units sold. So to humor those sales figures, there are about 1.6 million units of Mass Effect 3 out in the wild in the US.


Now things get into true speculation territory. There have been no case studies on how many people participate in niche online communities. One could look at any sampling of a community that is only a fraction of its total install base and call it a vocal minority. To be fair, the entire active BSN in all its glory would be a vocal minority compared to to the sum of that total base.


Lets take the thread I can see right off the bat with the highest number of views alone. No replies, nothing else. Just views.


That would be "So we can't get the ending we want after all?" sitting at a nice almost perfect 250k views. If you compare the number of people that looked at that thread compared to the 1.6 million copies in the wild, they stand at a pitiful 15% of the entire install base. To put that in perspective, even 400k fans would only account for 25% of the total number of copies out in the wild in the US alone.


So congratulations, every single person expressing their opinions in the forums is therefore a vocal minority(?). But then what does that mean for developing future content? Who then determines the direction the franchise takes? You could say that developers do what they want, but since when does any well educated business create a product with no target demographic or audience? That would be entirely stupid and negligent, not to mention risky monetarily (hurray for big words).


At the end of the day, Bioware responds to its fans. And guess what? Fans who participate with game developers are almost definitely a minority in nearly every case. Even MMO juggernauts like WoW only get a fraction of their user base to participate on their forums. They only have the "vocal minority" to respond to in terms of what direction to take content. Events like Blizzcon are designed to celebrate the passionate minority who want to go out of their way to participate in events with the companies they love. They spend thousands upon thousands to attend these events, and more often than not that money never sees a single charity like what the "Retake" movement is up to. You call what the Retake Mass Effect movement is doing insane? Try spending a day in the shoes of, again, the likes of Blizzard, who deal with spiteful vitriol every day and with every content update they release.


The community is the source for developers. They rely on their fans, that minority that participates, to gain insight into what they should and how they should do it. So yes, we are a minority. You are a minority. Most video game communities are minorities against the whole, but I'm not so omniscient as to claim there are no exceptions. So lets put things in perspective.


The community will speak, and the developer will listen. That doesn't by any means dictate the future actions the developer will take, but why would they alienate the same community that they not only rely on, but supported them through the hurdles of introducing a new and untested intellectual propety? Be the vocal minority. Stand up and be as large and vocal as you can, no matter what you believe, because we do have a hand in the shape of future content.

That said.

Hold the line.