I was thinking about how the popularity of video games and everything else mainstream in pop culture are related or if they are at all. Since the majority of gamers out there can be demographically labeled as mostly male, between the ages of 13-25, and most live in 1st world countries, those where computers are as normal in the household as televisions were 20 years ago. Now, this labeling also is something marketing companies take into account when they decide what channels to air their commercials on and all that jazz. Basically it comes down to who has the money and who is going to spend the money on what they are selling. This is my opinion and broken down into the simplest terms I know.
When it comes to the video game market, there are extremes and genres and groups and websites that play a major role as to whether something sells well or doesn’t. As I see it there are different people with different tastes, I don’t consider myself a person who follows the mainstream popular taste on much of anything in pop culture today. But, being an American consumer I’m not given many options when it comes to what I watch on television or hear on the radio, although XM radio is nice, there are still commercials on certain channels.
I feel like I live in this “what is popular world” where if I don’t enjoy or at least endure what the masses want I am labeled an outsider or something. That is where the geek, techie, nerd, gamer genre comes in, this is where I feel comfortable and these days being a techie is a major part of the mainstream.
This brings me to my next thought, just because a game like World of Warcraft has sold 8 million copies, does that automatically make it the best game ever created? Just like that old saying for Elvis fans, 50 million people can’t be wrong…well, yes they can. I am an Elvis fan, and I would say I am still a WoW fan, although I gave up the warcrack a while back. So, really, does it all come down to the money? He who has the most subscribers wins? I don’t really believe that. Hell, I still play Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, not because there are 5 million other people playing it or because I hear about it on the radio or on websites, but because it is a great game and is fun to play.
So, what makes a great game? I think this is the burning question on the minds of so many game developers. The first MMORPG I played a lot was dungeon siege, but that didn’t last too long. I spent a lot of time playing first-person shooters such as Battlefield 1942 and Unreal tournament, various other games come to mind. I even spent some time playing The Sims, I thought it was fun, although a single player game, I enjoyed the creativity that was there and although the micromanagement involved became tedious I still had fun.
Tobold’s post discussing The New Vision for MMORPG’s got me thinking about the future of MMO’s. The more accessible you make the game; the more people will play it. So, does popularity make a game great? Or is it popular because it is already great? The hype and money involved in promoting the next best thing can sometimes leave me feeling a bit disappointed after I go buy, install, update, customize and spend about 2 days wasting my time to find out I don’t really like the game after all…
Demo’s, I love demo versions of games, it gives me a taste of what the real game has to offer and whether or not I will go through with the purchase. Not all games have demos available for download and not every gamer out there has the ability to download demos, so then the PC gamers’ magazine with the bonus CD with all the goodies is there for your purchase. In the magazine there are all the advertisements for the next big game, the latest hardware, etc…
I wish G4 was geared more toward a mature audience like it used to be, but then again, look where all the money comes from to keep a station in business, the youth, so once again I feel like I am being denied access or what I would call useful material for my hobby just because I don’t swallow the mainstream pill, smile and ask for more.
Demo’s, I love demo versions of games,
I guess beta has become synonymous with demo when it comes to MMOs. It will be interesting to see how this evolves as time goes on; for the most part I think it’s fair to say that gamers play in a beta to find out how the game plays, to cut through the marketing spin and therefore see whether the game really is for them.
I wonder how many people have not taken up a game due to the beta, and whether they missed out. In my own experience, I decided Lord of the Rings Online wasn’t for me from the beta; it was WoW burnout and a lack of alternatives that meant I went back and tried it again and found it to be quite enjoyable once you got past the starter areas and in to the meat of the thing.
So betas are a double-edged sword, and although they’re touted as testing stages, they’re probably as much a demo as anything else, to allow the grass-roots gamer community to get the word out as to whether the game is any good.
There seems to be several stages to the popularity of a game, there’s the initial hype, usually if there’s a license involved then that gets used to full effect. Then there’s the community management stage, where forums are set-up and the hype is channelled and focussed. At this stage you should know whether your game has taken a grip in the mainstream, as much as games ever hit the real mainstream media – the BBC only recently put out their first news article on World of Warcraft on the TV, as far as I can tell – and then you slowly take the hype machine (or fanboys) and let them in to the game, managing them to make sure that they are ‘on side’ with the way the game has developed, and then get them to do the grass-roots promotion of it. Finally you let a large portion of the unwashed masses in, who by now are all chomping at the bit and fully indoctrinated into the ‘religion’ of the game, at which point you either take-off, or sink.
For WoW beta was a huge success, with the hype taking off beyond all imagination. Contrast and compare with Vanguard, where the beta was one huge lighthouse of a warning, giving players ample chance to avoid the hideous shipwreck that was forthcoming.
As I stated in my blog comments to your post (see my blog for more info), I think the new vision involves and open world and a definitive end-game scenario that is still presented in an open-ended format. You must have things do, rather than running around farming. I do however think bringing mainstream into a large gaming arena presents new benefits and challenges. The days of not being able to find 1 person who can craft the piece or run the quest you need is over IMO. By bringing in mainstream you somewhat solve the issue that has always plagued MMOs. The fact that Massively Multiplayer Online games have not necessarily been massive in terms player base has always been an issue. WoW has been the first game to see a difference in this area by bringing the “casual gamer” into the mix.