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

EA wants a piece of the pie...

[splerdu]

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.

Only 11.9 per cent?

[Kidbro]

Yeah, cos we all know that 11.9% of $35.8 billion is next to nothing.

Gamers are getting older

[fozzmeister]

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

Re:Gamers are getting older

[raygundan]

Very true, but I suspect that "gamers get older" has very little to do with the popularity of "mature" games. ("mature" is a bit misused, here, i think...) In fact, I would go so far as to surmise that these games are most popular with teenage boys. I don't think overwhelming bloodiness is the way into the pocketbooks of actual adults, except by way of their children.

What do adults play in stupendous numbers? Bejeweled, The Sims, Myst, and Mario Kart.

You're not going to catch your parents opining over the lack of realtime 3D evisceration in their games. I will, of course, continue to get a good laugh out of the gibs in quake, though.

I don't think they're important at all.

[Mantrid]

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.

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

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.

Absolutely!

[Mongoose Disciple]

..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.

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.

How Important are Entertaining Videogames?

[robbway]

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.