How Important Are Mature Videogames To The Industry?

Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its editorial discussing whether the market for 'Mature'-rated videogames is really that significant, following "EA CFO Warren Jenson's announcement last week that the company is working on a videogame based on Francis Ford Coppola's classic mafia movie The Godfather. The resulting game is expected to be EA's first foray into publishing M-rated... titles for several years." But the editorial argues: "Mature games, although certainly a popular theme with the stock market, are still basically a hot topic because of one franchise - namely Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto titles." It goes on to point out: "M-rated games accounted for only 11.9 per cent of videogame sales in the USA last year in total... despite this, publishers are rushing headlong into making mature games, believing that emulating the success of Grand Theft Auto is just a splash of blood and a bucketful of swearwords away."

Comments

Re:Personally,

[mcb123]

The problem with video games these days is they're all the same basic idea with different graphics mixed in. The bigger problem (for me) is I've gotten bored with the standard formula. Just about nothing is interesting anymore. If M rated games make publishers explore new game concepts, I'm all for it.

Same goes for movies

[Hungus]

I was unable to find any definate statistics as for percentages of movies made. average box office sales etc unfortunately. I can say that no R rated movie is in the top 20 highest grossing films of all time nor was there one for 2003. yet appearently the majority of movies released are rated R. You can also find teh listing of top movies as adjusted by inflation here

Re:Same goes for movies

[Pizzop]

the problem with you using the highest grossing movies of all time is that there are seperate audiences. The biggest audience is kids, because they are willing to kick and scream to go see a movie, and they are willing to go see a movie 7 or 8 times in the THEATRE. If you look at qualtity also, R doesn't necessiate quality, it does however mean that there are some concepts that kids "shouldn't" be exposed too. It's the same way with Video Games. Great games don't always sell high, and rating doesn't change that. What the video game industry needs to learn is that a little splash of blood, dropping the F-bomb, and then having a stripper get in the car won't necessarily bring in Sales, it just earns them the 'M' rating. They need to look at what actually sells the games.

But I could be completely wrong, because somehow the damn "Capella's BUCK HUNTER!" Games still sell.

Making a good "M" rated game...

[zokrath]

...Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence.

GTA and Vice City have excellent storylines and great voice acting to string together the amusing gameplay. Without the memorable characters or the hilarious radio talk shows the game loses much of its charm.

Sure, you can still run around and kill hookers for hours on end, but that is the player's choice. Some kids torture insects all day, and parents don't go and blame the Orkin man. Kids are going to do what they find amusing, or what they have been told is amusing. I doubt that many kids' respect for "workin' girls" was tarnished due to the influences of Grand Theft Auto.

Any parent that complains about what their children are exposed to in M rated games needs to be asked why their children are allowed to play M rated games in the first place.

But parents couldn't be to blame could they? Shame on me for asking parents to involve themselves in the raising of their own children, that is the task of the government, and the media, and that homeless guy that sits outside the mall asking for nickles.

Re:Making a good "M" rated game...

[Shadarr]

"Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence."

This is why GTA dominates the mature market. It's a genuinely good game that has content unsuitable for children. The rest of the "mature" games are decidedly immature. Things like BMX XXX, DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Postal 2, and Rockstar's own State of Emergency.

It's not the hooker-beating that makes GTA fun. Simpsons Hit & Run shows that you can take all that out and still have a fun game. Conversely, DOAXBV is a crappy volleyball game who's only selling point. With GTA, though, they've got a great game and a great mob-movie atmosphere. Developers could learn from that, but I bet they won't. And consequently, the so-called "mature" games will continue to be a very small part of the market.

They're important, but they never get it right

[Dragoon412]

Here's a lot of anecdotal evidence:

Back when I was probably 12 or 13, I was really into anime. That's when they were still making new episodes of Tank Police, and 8-man and the like; back when Sci-Fi showed Saturday morning anime. I eventually caught on to Gundam, and loved the mechs, but was rather ambivalent about the characters. Later, I felt the same way about NGE - awesome mechs, but I just wanted that whiney little fuck of a main character to die.

Back then, during the 8-bit and 16-bit era of gaming, most main characters weren't really age-specific. Sure, it might say a character's young, but they never really looked or acted that way, so I never thought much about it.

Then came the PSX era. If it wasn't the first time that games were really stratified into age groups, it was the first time I noticed it.

I remember playing games like FF7 and WildARMs and Grandia and just being completely blown away by how flagrantly immature the main characters (and most of the games) were. Some games I never even managed to finish just because it became so annoying, and I was still in the target demographic back then (I was 16 when FF7 was released). And it's always struck me as odd that I can manage suspension of belief for magic and monsters, but the idea of the same fucktards who routinely screw up my order at Taco Bell saving the Earth is just too much for me to fathom.

Flash forward to today: I'm 23. I no longer play console RPGs for the same reasons I can't stomach shows like Gundam (or almost any anime, for that matter): I'm sick to fucking death of having the main character act like a whiney, angsty pre-teen. I'm tired of watching stupid, clumsy, dysfunctional characters being put in positions of respect because they're portrayed as "cool." I'm tired of watching ham-fisted interpretations of serious issues because the devs needed to dumb it down for their target (barely literate) audience.

So, at this point in my life, I only really enjoy two styles of games: mindless hack-and-slash (like Ninja Gaiden, ROTK), and non-story-driven games. Ideally, I'd like to play an intelligent game, but every stab I've seen at intelligence in a game winds up being some pretentious mess like Xenogears that takes itself far too seriously, and about has all the intellectual complexity of the first 5 minutes of Philosophy 101 as taught by a hung-over grad student.

The point I'm trying to make is that with the 'original' gaming audience aging, games with more mature themes (or at least less immature characters) are going to become more important. The problem is that to developers, mature means gore. And that's the problem with mature games; many players, myself included, just don't want to be insulted by the game we're playing, we're not looking to strangle someone to death with his own intestines.

I found a study

[Hungus]

After having posted a couple of hours ago I came across this study of movie ratings and box office sales. It is a geocities site, but that aside it is well documented. To quote from it:

An Analysis of Film grosses

Do film ratings effect the box office success of a film? Theoretically, the impact should be minimal. Strictly based on the size of the potential audience, G, PG, and PG-13 rated movies should have an equal probability of success, while R rated films should be slightly less (due to the portion of the audience that is cut off), while X rated films should be the least successful. On the other hand a 'carnal nature' analysis would indicate that the most obscene movies would attract the greatest audiences, with people desiring to see the 'forbidden fruit' of R and X rated films, while wanting to avoid the child play of G rated films. Furthermore, since the price of adult admission is higher than that for children, the adult films have another advantage in the quest for the box office dollar. In the first ten years of the modern rating system, it was found that from the implementation of the modern rating system that as a whole, more R rated films were produced than any other film type.[7]However, these restricted films were much less successful than their unrestricted counterparts. The G-rated films, though viewed as "box-office poison" were produced in the fewest number, yet enjoyed very high success ratios. The theory of movie ratings and their impact on the success of a film were analyzed to determine the success of the ratings system. Does the system appear to produce the films that the public desires? Does the system allow the motion picture companies to maximize profits? Is artistic freedom enhanced by the implementation of the rating system? In order to determine the conclusion to these problems, the ratings of films were compared with their box office gross. Furthermore the trend of the ratings were analyzed over time. The analysis led to a system similar to that found earlier[8], in which the number of restricted films, while enjoying a lower level of profitability were being produced in increasingly greater number. The most popular films continue to be those that are not restricted.