Category: Marketing/Business

The Guardian’s Lindesay Irvine expressed reservations about best-selling author James Patterson’s move into computer games. Apparently Patterson is planning on working on games that will appeal to his current audience: women and middle-aged people. Irvine just can’t fathom the idea of these people going out “to buy PlayStations and get their thumbs around the controls”. Fine, but apparently Patterson is selling his games for the PC, mobile phones, and possibly for the Wii…all things that casual players own.

Also, ugh. Middle-aged women just wouldn’t know how to play video games? It’s an outdated way of thinking.

Patterson thinks that he may be onto an untapped market. People like his books, and they may think that they don’t like video games, but they may enjoy playing video games based on his works. Lots of people don’t think they play video games, but they do play Bejeweled without a second thought. They think that they aren’t gamers since, you know, video games are for immature males who just want to shoot things. In fact, Patterson says so himself:

It strikes me that the videogame area is an incredibly lucrative niche market, one populated by a small number of boys – and grown-up boys – who like to shoot things and spend a lot of money.

I’ll first say that he isn’t saying anything that the game industry hasn’t already accepted, or at least had the opportunity to accept. Plenty has been written about the hardcore audience and how they used to be considered “mainstream” until people realized that there was an entire mainstream audience that was being ignored.

But here is Patterson, intentionally or not, slighting that audience. If you’re an adult, you’re just being a child when you play games. And if you’re a female who already plays games? You know, a member of a significant part of the market? Well, clearly Patterson needs to reach out to you since you’re not really playing games. If you were, you’d just be an immature boy. Also, there has already been a lot of money spent outside of this niche. Casual games are making, what, billions now?

Patterson should be applauded for trying to bring out the gamer in people who think they aren’t gamers, but the 80s called and it wants its video game market perception back.

As for Irvine, he doesn’t get a free pass on his outdated perceptions, either.

I wouldn’t dispute that computer games have the potential to offer something more than the joys of pretend killing. There’s room for imagination in worlds like The Sims and the strangely banal parallel universe of Second Life.

The joys of pretend killing. Roger Ebert called, and he wants his perception of video games back, although good job on knowing the name Second Life. What about games like Maniac Mansion, King’s Quest, Myst, Tetris, and any other game where the focus is not on death and destruction?

Is this a Luddite response? Should I look forward to the Iris Murdoch quest where players race to collect symbols and Jungian archetypes, and the first Martin Amis first-person shooter? To the Henry James adventure where you attempt to escape from inside 3-D versions of his sentences? The Crime and Punishment actioner where you must get away with murder; to rescue fantasies where you can save Tess or Anna Karenina?

Just because you have an inability to see what someone can do with a new medium, it doesn’t mean that others will have the same problem, Irvine. The Guardian’s Alastair Harper argues that video games are just a new medium for storytelling.

Of course, this idea isn’t a new one either, is it? Lots of game developers, past and present, have thought of video games as just another storytelling medium, and many more see story as a significant part of a game. Lorne Lanning’s Oddworld is one result. The IGDA’s special interest group for game writers is another. Of course, other people might argue that games aren’t about telling a story and aren’t ideal for doing so, just as movies aren’t ideal for showing off a live performance. They excel in different ways.

I guess if anything, I find the entire “debate” old hat, but I’m sure there are going to be a lot of people who will read about Patterson’s decision to enter the video game market and learn about this debate for the first time. A lot of these people don’t yet realize that they already play video games because they don’t think they count. After all, they aren’t acting like immature boys shooting anything that moves and spending hundreds of dollars to support the habit. They just play Peggle or Tetris. Or Myst, or Wii Bowling. But not normal video games.

Perception doesn’t change to match reality fast enough, I guess. I guess I’m a bit upset by the generalizations that go unchecked by all parties, but I’m glad that video games are becoming at least somewhat more accepted outside of the hardcore market.

I’m going to go play Homeworld now. I could read a book or watch a movie, but a lot of them are ultra violent, although I admit that sometimes you can find something good like The Great Gatsby or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. If I were to base my opinion of an entire industry based on what the top sellers are, I’d say that the movie and book industries are just full of gore and sex for the immature audience that consumes them. Trashy romance novels and movies about fart jokes? Please. Pot, you may continue calling the kettle black as long as you want, but understand why Kettle might make fun of you for it.

In The Escapist last week, Shannon Drake’s article Vision Doesn’t Sell Copies: The Short Life of Clover Studios talked about the development group within Capcom responsible for the games Viewtiful Joe 2, Okami, and God Hand. Clover Studios was created to “bring more originality to [Capcom’s] products, thus leading to higher profits and better brand recognition.”

I own Viewtiful Joe 2 for the GameCube. I haven’t played either Okami or God Hand, but they received some great reviews and awards.

It turned out that good reviews and awards don’t sell games. Or at least not “enough” games.

Capcom also made Dead Rising, which sold a million titles on a single platform, the Xbox 360. Viewtiful Joe 2 sold 61,000 copies on the GameCube and and 18,000 copies on the PS 2. If your business was making and selling games, which games would you direct your resources towards?

If you’ve played Viewtiful Joe 2, you would probably be as surprised as I was at these sales figures. Who hasn’t played it? Well, apparently a lot of people haven’t. I think the Dead Rising sales figures might have more to do with a lack of Xbox 360 games than with anything else. After all, the N64 had almost all of its launch titles sell over a million copies. The PS 2 has a lot of competition, and the GameCube has less. Still, selling thousands instead of millions can be disheartening.

Similarly, a number of people were surprised at the sales figures for Gish, Chronic Logic’s IGF Grand Prize-winning game about a ball of tar saving his girlfriend. It was innovative, it was fun, and yet it sold only a few thousand copies, most within the first two years of its release.

On the one hand, it is surprising that the game didn’t sell much better. With all of the publicity from the IGF awards, more people should have paid for a chance to see what an indie could do.

On the other hand, who could play it? I remember telling my friends about the game, making sure to note that it runs on Gnu/Linux. One of them complained that he couldn’t get it to run. It was jerky and slow. After talking to him over the phone, I found out that he had a very underpowered machine. “Oh, sorry. I just assumed a simple side-scroller wouldn’t require a lot of horsepower to run.”

A similar thing was happening with Dirk Dashing when a Gnu/Linux client was announced. A number of people complained on Gnu/Linux game sites about the need for hardware acceleration for what appears to be a simple side-scrolling platformer.

While those are problems of perception from players, and specifically people who don’t have modern, moderately powerful hardware for their Gnu/Linux machines, I’m sure that the hardware requirements couldn’t have hurt. Pretty much anyone meets the requirements for Bejeweled or Spiderweb Software’s games. Perhaps Gish was hurt because people couldn’t even run it. While the developers claim in their postmortem that leeches are “too smart” to pay for games, I am not so sure that you can pin a lot of blame on them. There are two benefits for the customer when you offer a demo. First, they can find out if they would even like the game. Some people didn’t like Gish, claiming it was too clunky to play. Second, they can find out if they can even play the game on their machines. If you’re still running a sub-1GHz processor, you’re out of luck.

It doesn’t explain what was wrong with Viewtiful Joe 2. You could walk into a store, pick up a copy of the game, and know that it will run on your console the way it was meant to be played. It received many more awards than Gish, including quite a few that the general gaming public would hear about. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And yet it is considered a failure.

Tadhg Kelly of particleblog wrote that perhaps games cost too much to make. Hundreds of thousands of copies should be good, and in other industries those kinds of numbers would be great. Of course, when one game about zombies sells millions, why don’t these original games sell better?

What happened to the “contrary to conventional wisdom” revelation that profitable games are not just clones and more-of-the-same? Wasn’t it something of a news item a year or two back that the most profitable games were original properties? Is it a problem of marketing? Perhaps Dead Rising and Lost Planet received much heavier support than Viewtiful Joe 2 or Okami from Capcom?

I’ve heard a few indies complain about the lack of sales for their innovative games as compared to their clone games or sequels to clone games. Almost always, I’ve looked at the innovative game and thought, “Yeah, it’s innovative, but it’s not very fun.”

I think there are a number of variables in play. Marketing may be lacking or even wrong, telling the players something that they don’t expect when they sit down to play the game. Perhaps the price isn’t right. Maybe the game itself isn’t as good as the players would like. But I have a hard time believing that players don’t like different or new in preference to clones and prettier versions of older games.

I guess a better question is, “Why haven’t I bought Gish yet?” I’m a potential customer, and I think it is fun. I know it runs on my machine just fine. So what is stopping me from pulling out my credit card and purchasing it?

I don’t know why I didn’t do so when it first came out. I remember playing the demo, and it was fun. Heck, multiplayer was fun, and I find it funny that you don’t hear more about that aspect of the game. More importantly, out of all of the games out there, it actually runs on Gnu/Linux. I review a lot of Windows-only games for Game Tunnel, so playing a game on my preferred OS, one of the reasons I want to make games myself, is ideal. There is no reason for me not to purchase it.

So I did. It is technically my first purchase of an indie title.

Maybe there is more to the customer’s inertia involved in a sale than I thought.