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Gamers Are Fans of Games, Not Genres
_xeno_ writes: A recent article on Steam Spy talks about how a "target audience" for game genres doesn't exist — or, more specifically, how there is no such thing as an "FPS gamer" or an "MMO gamer" or a "MOBA gamer." The majority of players tend to be fans of specific games, rather than genres. For example, the wildly popular MMO World of Warcraft managed to reach over 10 million players at its peak. However, these players never became "MMO gamers" — they were simply World of Warcraft gamers. As World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers fall, there's been no corresponding uptick in subscribers of other, competing MMOs. In fact, pretty much ever MMO released since World of Warcraft has been forced to move to a "free-to-play" model simply to survive. The article explains how the majority of gamers concentrate on a very small number of games, rarely trying new games: they're fans of a specific game, not any game that plays like it.
Gamers like their genres, the problem is there might be one great game and then a bunch of crappy clones. So it seems like they stick to one game, when the fact is, there isn't that many good games.
Every time something becomes big, you get a dozen wanna-be games flooding the market, trying to make money off the popularity of the popular game. Crappy stuff usually. What we need is developers to be given the time they need to make games good and have their points, instead of quickly shoving it out the door at a certain set date. 40 years into the gaming industry and they still make the same mistakes they should of learned better from before.
Currently I've been playing Everquest 1 on one of it's time locked progression server. Why? Because it's fun and I'm having a great time playing it with my friends. 20 year old MMORPG is better to me then most of the current ones.
Be seeing you...
According to the sheer number of knock-off games that developers have created, evidently it isn't common sense. Otherwise they wouldn't waste so much time creating something that would do well to make its investment back.
For me, I think the following factors determine which games I decide to try:
- Is it interesting enough to grab my attention?
- Is it fun and challenging enough to keep my attention?
- Does it adequately reward me (somehow) for the progress I make? Even if that "somehow" is knowing I completed a worthy challenge.
- (If multiplayer) How many of my friends currently play?
For that last one, the "currently" is important. I used to play Halo all the time, but after Destiny released and the MCC debacle, my friends don't play Halo any more so I rarely play either.
Really, I think that's all. It doesn't have to be something like the other games I play (on the contrary, I find playing games that are too similar to my favorites to be wasteful). It doesn't have to be super popular, or even polished... I've put tons of time into Kerbal Space Program and several of its beta versions (heck, even its release) were not nearly as polished as some games that I played once and never looked back.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Different genres work differently. They use time in different ways. Sometimes, especially with MMOs, they heavily encourage focus on one of them, without giving you very much that can be cross-applied to others. If this is happening with FPS, for example, it's only because of the recent trend of wedging in progression mechanics whether they belong or not. There are still plenty of FPS where the core gameplay, out of the box, is similar enough that being good in one of them will mean you're good in another, which means the sunk cost fallacy doesn't happen.
Another genre that completely trashes this argument is RPGs, whichever letter you put in front of them. People play those to see story, characters, and setting. It wouldn't even make sense to play only one. That'd be like saying there's no such thing as a sci-fi fan; only people who like the Foundation series or Hitchhiker's Guide.
Really? I've heard people say literally that. I would say most people don't stick to just one genre but they mostly float in just a few.
Lots of people don't like superhero movies, don't like movies with ambiguous villains and morality, don't like movies with clear villans and black & white morality, don't like arthouse films, don't like mainstream films, don't like character studies, don't like crime dramas...
In books people like romance, or detective, or Science Fiction, or fantasy, or horror, or humour, or comics, or historical fiction, or slice-of-life, or coming-of-age, or a combination of a few of those and others I can't think of at the moment. It always amused me that book genre was frequently defined by setting, whereas setting is considered almost irrelevant to video game genre classification.
Music comes in very clear genres and people very rarely like classical music and hip-hop music and folk music to an equal degree.
I like RPG*, RTS, and Adventure.
*Not Elder-Scrolls or similar. Not most JRPGs, although Chrono Trigger was pretty good and hell, early Sega Master system RPGs were good. RPG is a wide genre that also includes Might & Magic, Ultima, Infinity Engine games and similar-style, Fallouts 1 & 2, Wizardly, Shadowrun Returns, "old-school" RPG, Mass Effect 1 and to a lesser extent 3, etc.. -- this is where the article has a point; RPG is too broad and JRPG and Western RPG doesn't really divide the market correctly in my opinion.
> Maybe I'm out of touch or something but I didn't even know what MOBA is
Yes, it's fair to say you are out of touch.
Defense of the Ancients, a WCIII map mod birthed the genre, and League of Legends is the king, with 67 million players per month (from wkipedia). There's others in the dota line, a flurry of lesser players, and Blizzard is in on the action now with Heroes of the Storm.
Also- everyone I know who plays *a* moba, plays multiple ones. Everyone I know who plays WoW has tried other MMOs*, but has to come back to WoW, because the other MMOs* really don't touch WoW's set of depth (particularly with raids).
*The real reason this comparison sucks is, WoW is a very SPECIFIC type of MMO, which I'll call a "wowlike". A "wowlike" has you level through fixed content with quests to cap, and the leveling can be done solo. Once at cap, you have a bunch of instanced raids that reset each week, and there's a separate pvp system that rewards you with some kind of pvp currency you can use to boost your power in that realm. On top of this, your character powers up through levels at first, but eventually the progression from levels is a rounding error- only the stats on the gear end up contributing to player power, meaning that gear at max level is the primary mechanism. When an expansion comes out, it raises the level cap, and the higher level characters can't utilize their old gear very much, and the "gear treadmill" is reset. These games have a "global cooldown" that represents how often things can happen, they almost never block player pathing or action, especially regarding other players, acceleration and turning is always infinite, and a maximum speed is reached instantly. The maximum speed is either identical for all players, or very close together. End game gear is always best from a "raid", the weekly reset that requires a large but FIXED number of players to engage in combat versus scripted enemies, each of whom drops gear from a finite loot set, and that gear is desired to complete the upgrades the characters desire to become more powerful.
This "wowlike" description explicitly includes all the games meant to copy wow, such as lotro, warhammer, vanguard, swtor, wildstar, and many many many many others.
It's no surprise that if you play wow, you aren't necessarily going to be interested in the budget knock off of the same game, especially while wow continues to pump out new content. That above set of restrictions- all of them- are almost universally present, meaning that they are explicitly copying wow (and no, not EQ).
Meanwhile, the REST of the MMO genre is much more diverse- a WoW player won't have much in common with an EVE online player necessarily, or even an old school everquest player.
Anyway, mobas are huge, and it is surprising to me that you haven't heard about them. They fill stadiums, big time e-sport games.