This is why we can't have nice things (good games vs. successful games)

[bluswordgrl]

Oh my gosh, Beyond Good & Evil is an awesome game! One of my absolute favorites! Surprised it didn't do better, especially since they put it out on just about every console back then and pc to boot! I remember everyone freaking out at E3 a few years ago when they showed a teaser trailer for BG&E 2. Haven't heard much about it since then though.

[Shoganai]

Beyond Good & Evil is a flash sale on Steam right now - $2.49...

[yerkyerk]

It's €1,24 here ^^
Already got it though -.-

[hooby]

Well, to get back on topic: "Why we can't have nice things".

I believe you have to look much deeper into this. Just saying "highly rated games need more financial success" doesn't quite tackle the root of the problem - i think.

I mean there will always be a majority of mainstream-users who just go for whatever games are currently considered "best" by mainstream consensus - a consensus which in turn is heavily directed and influenced by marketing. The same thing is true for charts-hits in music, and typical shallow Hollywood blockbusters in the movie business.

Gaming may have been slightly different once - back when it was more of a niche hobby, practiced only by a very specific sort of guys - but gaming now is an accepted part of our culture and widely spread - people of all ages, classes and genders are playing video games, and almost 100% of young people have played a video game at least once in their lives.

The mainstream market will stay with those yearly released dlc-heavy sequels, remaking the same game based on the same formula over and over and over again. They will continue investing hundred millions of dollars on marketing campaigns and their products will stay the most sold, most profit-making games with the highest development/production costs.

But that doesn't mean we can't have nice things. I mean, there is lots of alternative music besides whatever is currently "in" and dominates the sales charts. And in the movie business even Hollywood itself does make movies with more depth and substance, because once those movies got an Oscar, they do sell well.

We can have nice things - but we must not expect those nice things to be the financially most successful games. Just like the best music is not in the charts, and the best movies are not the most grossing.

Why is it like that? That's actually quite easy to explain. Mainstream is like the lowest common denominator that almost anyone can agree upon. It's the center of the map - but it also has to be rather generic and bland because anything too "extreme" would scare away some people. Once you decide to step away from that mainstream audience, there's a huge number of directions you can go. Like all the borders of the map. But the problem is, whatever direction you move - you get closer to only one single "non-mainstream" direction, but at the same time you move further away from every other (different) "non-mainstream" direction.

So mainstream can work for a large number of people - because of it being rather generic and bland. The alternatives on the other hand are manifold and can never appeal to all the people looking for alternatives - but only to small subset of those.

What does that mean? That means we net lots of alternatives, all going for different directions, to just be able to cover all ground. And that's something a hundred million dollar production just can't do. This is exactly the place where I believe the indies do come in. They work on smaller budgets, and therefore are able to target a much smaller, more narrow audience - which in turn allows them to much more directly appeal to the preferences of that smaller audience.

The real problem is - that the indie scene is only just beginning to kick ass. It's very young - and up until now it suffered from a very great hindrance: It could not get any funding - or if they could secure funding, than only on the very, very stringent terms of the publisher - always pushing them further into mainstream territory, and away from specializing on any specific direction into alternative grounds.

But that old structure is breaking up, right now as we speak. Crowd-funding sites (like Kickstarter) for the first time in history allow developer studios to secure funding without publisher interference. And that's a very important turning point.

Developers want to make great games - it's their passion and their individual fulfillment. They also want to earn enough money to keep their living standard.
Gamers want to play great games - it's their passion. And they are willing to pay justifiable amounts of money for that.
This would actually make for a great, mutual beneficial relationship. Gamers get what they want, by just paying enough to allow developers to continue to do what they want.

The publisher is a wedge in that relationship, squeezing itself in-between gamer and developer. They don't care much about what the developers want, neither do they care much about what the gamers want. They only care about the profits of their shareholders. Their main goal is to give less money to the developers, and to get more money from the players. And to reduce the amount of risk involved. They don't care about good games - they only care about good selling games.

So removing that opposing part from the equation - by creating a direct, unmediated flow of money from gamers to developers - should improve things a lot. It should allow for a thriving alternate market - that operates outside the boundaries of mainstream-land (where they couldn't compete with the big publishers anyways).

[Capn Tucker]

Amen to that. Let the Axis of Evil continue to churn out "Call of Duty 17", or "Battlefield 12", or some other such shite. Meanwhile we the gamers will be enjoying the games that we want to play, like Grim Dawn, Wasteland 2, Torchlight etc..

[Magic Missile]

I cast Animate Dead.

Thing is it is possible to target an audience without dumbing it down for any of them. It's just so incredibly difficult to do that few manage it. So you have your mainstream games that everyone kind of likes but not really, and then more specific games that more strongly appeal to a stronger audience... but there's also truly amazing games that strongly appeal to a wide audience. They can be counted on your fingers with some left over but they do exist.