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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.
Aren't all games displayed in frames per second? /duck
This makes sense. When I was quite young, I was perplexed by the idea of a genre. I saw surveys with a check box. What games do I like"[] platforming, []racing, []shooters, []puzzle, etc" I looked at the survey and was confused that they could classify such diverse games into such small categories. The thought didn't even occur to me that games were like each other so much they could be classified. I simply thought games were all different. Now as a game designer, game programmer, I can see genre classifications, but I think to operate in them is laziness. I think with something as complex as a computer, we can have new genres of games like Katamari Damacy if someone puts their mind to it. I think experimenting and trying stuff no one tried before is bold and to be praised.
Just like children can't see through the veil when watching a movie and needs to be reminded Godzilla isn't real and the set is a miniature city, I think a lot of people get caught up in games without thinking how the game is made or similar to other games. A lot of people just play and if they like it, they stay. I just wish the veil wasn't so thick that people could see through a Clash of Clans, Farmville meets castle, pay to win, and wouldn't sponsor that type of drivel. I once had a "game designer" honestly think Clash of Clans took as much skill as Wacraft3 to play... The veil is there even for people who are supposed game developers.
God spoke to me
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...
I've followed the tournament Fighting Game scene for a few years now, and it seems like there is a lot of crossover of the top tier players. They seem to exclusively play fighting games, but of course the top tier players are certainly only a small subset of the purchasers/players. Considering how visible they are, I wonder if the marketers think that's how all genres work?
MMO's are a crappy comparison because:
1. It is SOO important to have a good set of people to play with that 'switching to MMO xyz' immediately becomes extremely difficult. Maybe in a series of multiverse guilds supported by some awesome gaming service hub could work like a guilds-out-of-games social service, but it doesn't exist, so the entropy moving from title to title is very hard at this point
2. MMO's in general wear you down in ways that make you never want to go back to MMO's. I like to grind once and a while because I'm sadistic, but I imagine a lot of people who've played MMO's never went back because the genre was so punishing
3. The entire 'point' of an MMO (as well as other genre titles) is to suck you into their playing system in a way that moving off to competitors becomes too high cost. Oh you wanna drop sub and play that -other- game? Well sure, but we'll delete your content after being idle for a certain time, etc.. like that
There are certainly some holy wars of gaming which have polarized gamers against one another, such as DOTA 2 / LOL. That doens't mean people can't enjoy the fruits of both, but people tend to stick to what they're used to for 'regularly played' games regardless of the competition. Realistically, the games are so close that anyone competent on one could be the same with some training for the other.
Bye!
Unless it's Crysis which uses the seconds per frame unit of measure.
At least half of the people I know who play Final Fantasy XIV came there from another MMO (mostly WoW).
Back when I played WoW, most of the people I knew came there from other MMOs.
For that matter, in pretty much every MMO I've played, one of the stock discussion tropes is "which MMO did you play before this?" - with a very, very low percentage who never played MMOs before.
Yeah, most people also play other genres, but if you made them choose, you'd find that pretty much everyone IS primarily one "type" of gamer first.
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.
Most chess players have no interest in checkers, poker, or go.
I'm not sure that's true. I've never met a chess play who couldn't play checkers. Chess players often switch to poker, and there are even chess + poker tournaments.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The vast majority of my friends and coworkers play FPS games, but I can't think of anyone that plays MMOs.
Do you understand that WoW was so popular for a while, that Slashdot has a field in the user settings where you can put which server you play on? You're posting on Slashdot, you associate with plenty of people who play MMOs.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I USED to consider myself an MMO gamer. Played UO for almost 6 years. Then moved to EQ. I thought, wow, this isn't nearly as feature-filled as UO, but hey, 3D GRAPHICS! Played that for 4 years. Then I started playing DAOC, and a whole host of others, including WoW and even some more recent ones like LOTRO and SWTOR. Each successive game I played lost my interest more quickly than the last. I tried to play ArcheAge and I lasted a whole week before I gave up on it.
Most MMO's have turned into nothing but F2P grind-fests. They are time and money sinks. Either waste a whole crapload of time grinding a quest for a shiny bauble, or, OR... you could purchase the bobble on our store. Not with game money silly, with real money!
I'm still convinced that UO is the most feature-complete MMO created to date, and aside from it's antiquated graphics and interface (Which they may have updated since then) nothing since then has come close.
Now, I play games other than MMO's, but I wouldn't consider myself a fan of any particular genre or style. I do despise most of the mobile F2P games. I don't view them as games at all, they're formulaic, addictive and only designed to get you to spend small amounts of cash frequently so you don't realize that over the last 3 months, you've dumped more into this "free" app than you spend on WoW over the course of a year. Scams are what I consider them.
Sorry if this sounds like a "Back in MY day" rant, but I am getting a bit long in the tooth.
Most chess players have no interest in checkers, poker, or go.
I'm not sure that's true. I've never met a chess play who couldn't play checkers. Chess players often switch to poker, and there are even chess + poker tournaments.
Funny, I play chess, not at a tournament level but for fun, and I sometimes like playing checkers and love playing poker. Of course, playing poker, for me, isn't about playing cards it's about having fun with my friends. As for Go, the only reason why a lot of people don't play Go is because it isn't all that popular, at least in the US and Canada. I would think that a lot of Chess players would also enjoy Go because it does require strategy.
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.
The fighting game scene seems to contradict the article. You have entire websites such as Shoryuken that are dedicated to them, and fans of the genre (myself included) will buy a fighting game on a whim, just to see how it stacks up to other fighters. You have people who still actively play in the scene, playing games that are 10+ years old competitively, while still picking up and learning new games. Killer Instinct, Tekken 7, Street Fighter V, Mortal Kombat X, Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Skullgirls, Marvel vs Capcom, and so many more...people are buying these games across multiple consoles and PC, simply because they are a part of the fighting game genre. Then you have comedy types of games of the genre, such as Divekick, that sells well not only due to the fact it's a fighting game, but because the scene comes together to make things like this happen, and be supported.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
I am definitely a genre gamer. It's just that I don't have a lot of time, and am really picky about games I play as a result - so it might be years, but eventually i'll find a game in the genres that I like.
I could easily see the same about MMO gamers - lets say you burn out on Warcraft. Why would that mean you'd immediately go into another large time sink, instead of taking some time off?
I'm a fan of hiking too but I don't hike every day... guess I'm not a "real hiker" and no real hikers (like true Scotsman) exist.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can't be a fan of genres when they're so badly defined. Ie, RPG games which somehow links in utter dreck like Japanese RPG games. Saw a youtube of top ten RPGs of past 10 years, and only 2 of them I would even call RPGs and only 4 I ever heard of.
FPS games, that includes so much stuff it's not even reasonable to use that term any more; do they mean twitch gaming shooters, or open world sandbox shooters, player vs player shooters, hunting simulations, the glut of zombie games, MMO shooters, etc. You can't put Borderlands and Doom in the same category, or Doom and Far Cry, etc.
MMOs - I know that there are players that will try every single one of them but seriously, almost no one has time for more than one of these at a time. Trying to market to an MMO player by saying "it's just like the one your'e addicted to but different and without any of your friends" is doomed to fail, the most you can distinguish is "generic MMO set in an existing IP you might like" vs "generic MMO in a custom IP with a vaguely anime feel" vs "MMO designed by seriously disgruntled hardcore devs and intended only for the ten hardcore players that they like" vs "we want to be WoW and are giving it a shot".
Then there are the games which tried to be different and not fit a niche, so there's no category for them. The Thief series, it's about sneaking but people try to call it an FPS because people want categories. And the Thief wannabes which don't measure up but which possibly could be called sneaking games. Then there are hybrid Action/RPG, some of which I like but they can't realy decide if they want to disappoint RPG players or disappoint FPS players, or designed for one crowd but mis-marketed to the other crowd. Or a game that's entirely story and you just follow along and every 10 minutes you have to do a quick-time event. Games that are RTS with RPG elements, or RPGs with RTS elements. And utterly unique things like Katamari Damashi.
I would like a modern reskinning of Daggarfall. They don't need to add any new content. Just a modern graphical layer to wrap it all in.
I mostly play single player RPGs, some strategy games. These days one of the defining points of RPGs is in a LOT of games. I'm talking about character development, which in video game RPGs has usually been shown as character ability development. The other main defining point of RPGs is plot. This has also been in more and more games. As other games gain those traits my interest in them increases. I prefer RPGs that require thought more than speed on the keyboard.
Genres blend, divide, and blend again. When Diablo came out, I thought stay away from any action RPG. Nowhere near enough plot. I did eventually play it. It didn't even have enough freedom of character creation, to say nothing of plot. I thought it was more similar to what was called adventure in the days of Legend of Zelda(NES).
But, games like Morrowind and Mass Effect pulled me toward Action RPGs. These days most RPGs also part of whatever genre both FPS and sword fighting games like Skyrim make up.
When I was a teenager, I'd pretty much play any game I had available. But, games that had character progression, I was more likely to replay. Zelda, Metroid.
Small change, Aeon of Strife in Starcraft Broodwars was the precursor to DOTA for WC3.
Back when I played the original Defense of the Ancients (before a different map maker took it over and made it suck), that type of map was always referred to as an "AoS" map.
I used to be an MMO Player, I played several, with my biggest amount of time spent in World of Warcraft.
I stopped playing MMOs when NCSoft killed my favourite MMO out of the blue: City of Heroes.
I liked it because it was not like other MMOs I had played. There were no restrictions on level, class, gear or skill as to which players could team up and have fun together. Your character was totally unique. There was the most and best story telling I've seen in any MMO, including WoW. It wasn't perfect, but I still consider it the best game ever.
I was having a lot of fun in that game, only having discovered it quite late (It was at first not available where I lived).
Then NCSoft killed it two weeks before the new expansion went live. By what information the players could gather, not for financial reasons, but due to corporate politics.
After that I decided I never wanted to invest time again into something where I was at the mercy of a corporate boardroom on the other side of the globe. I don't want to play any game where I don't control the hardware needed to run it.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor