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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."
Sure it's only 11.9%. But if GTA accounted for 90% of that 11.9% that's a lot of sales. Fact is there aren't many popular M-rated games.
Might be better than duking it out with the hundreds of other titles.
Yeah, cos we all know that 11.9% of $35.8 billion is next to nothing.
May we live long and die out
Just like on TV there are kids films (for kids) there are Family Films (something for everyone), teen flics for teens, and things like The Godfather etc, so it will be natural that as the Gamer covers more and more of the age range, some games will be made that target those different areas
I'm not sure that I've ever bought a game based on its rating; well perhaps in the Mortal Kombat days it was interesting to see what all the fuss was about, but those days are long past. Only how fun the game is matters, and I must confess it must look decent for me to be interested as well, but I wouldn't buy or not buy a game based on whether or not I could see a decapitation or some T&A.
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.
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
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...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.
..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.
I couldn't agree more.
In a lot of ways, I think this fixation of game developers upon "mature" games is a mistake. For people not very familiar with GTA, it's easy to make the (incorrect) assumption that the game sells because of its adult content.
The truth is that GTA sells because it's a good game.
There's always going to be a market for good games of any genre, platform, maturity level, or whatever. That's the lesson game developers should be learning here.
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.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
As an adult with no children, I don't even use the rating system. I buy games I either know or think will be fun to play. Since theoretically only adults should be buying M-Games, the rating system doesn't really apply to them.
Therefore, the Mature label is really an enticement for younger age groups. It's very obvious to me. Old gamers stay old gamers until the games aren't appealing anymore. But young gamers get drawn in "for the first time." Therefore, the "M" is attempting to keep it's customer base.
This unfortunately means we're in for a lot of artificially rated "M" games which could really be "E" if you removed the cursing or gratuitous violence. This has already taken over the movie industry where I see a PG-13 movie artificially rated R with gratuitous swearing.
in "Optional" mature content. How many awesome games were NOT sold due to some kid's parents saying it was too violent/had too much cussing/etc?
;)
I understand that some people want "mature" content in their video games. But make it optional. Call of Duty has the blood as an optional setting. Halo: Combat Evolved does too, at least in the pc version, albeit disguised as "texture quality".
My suggestion is to have options like so in all video games, with a few exceptions, of course. Let the end user decide if he wants the gore. Cussing, naturally, isn't as easy to censor optionally, and I see no reason to have two different meshes for all female characters... one in the bikini, the other mesh with full-length dress, that's just nonsense.
Is "Mature" necessary to the video game industry? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that some gamers won't buy games unless they have "mature" content in them, but no in the sense that a game has to have "mature" content or it won't sell well.