266: We Are Not Mainstream

[rddj623]

It's nice to see it broken down like that. I realized there was an over hype about the mainstream and video games but hadn't realized just how over hyped. It is nice to be in a smaller community. Hobbies are, in my opinion, better when kept in smaller communities. Movies aren't really a hobby. Unless you are a film maker, then it's a far different story.

 

[MadCat55329]

I think this article puts a well-developed case, and to me, it jives pretty well with Nintendo's recent statement about wishing videogames were more socially acceptable. However, once gaming does become a mainstream activity, we'll expect more of the "casual gamers don't buy games" behavior. The same thing is true of music or film purchase. Most of the general public may see around three films in the theatre a year, or only see the one show their favourite act plays in town. Similarly, the majority of gamers I imagine will only play free-to-play webgames like Farmville, or purchase perchance one Modern Warfare type game a year at most.

This is however, not the feedback I wish to bring to this article. I merely wish to whine about the fact that I *wish* movie tickets were merely $7.18 apiece around my parts.

 

[Evamarie]

Explain to me how Grand Theft Auto IV is less time wasting than Sims characters? It has no purpose? Sims has just as much purpose any video game. Didn't the features last week deal with not being fanboy jerks condemning other people's video game habits?

Also being "mainstream" is about more than just numbers.

 

[The Random One]

You're wrong.

And everyone pretty much nailed the point. You're denouncing the wrong definition marketers have of mainstream and coming up with one yourself. Gaming is mainstream because pretty much everyone knows what it's like. That's it. Maybe less people played GTAIV than watched Avatar, but that doesn't mean people don't know what GTA is, and that's what mainstream is. Compare this to, what, fifteen years ago when it was a hermetic activity most people didn't understand at all. Then compare this to, say, train modeling. If you say you're going to play videogames most people wouldn't bat an eye. If you say you're going to work on your train models... they would.

Unless you're sixty. Although they'd bat their eyes in both cases then.

(Also for me Avatar is and remains being the Nickelodeon cartoon.)

 

[The Big Eye]

Well-written, and mostly correct. The fact that video games require more time to properly consume is irrelevant. One person playing video games for fifty hours < Twenty-five people watching a movie for two hours.

It's true that we're not fully accepted yet. We should embrace that. Make those S.O.B.s in the skyscrapers spend less on graphics, charge less for their games, and stop catering so much to the "casual" crowd. It's a lesson they should have learned long ago.

 

[aldowyn]

One thing: It is mainstream in certain audiences. I'm in high school, and I'm pretty sure that more than 75% of the guys play video games (like half of them have MW2... I don't, at least not yet), and quite a few of the girls. (Not nearly as many, though. Certainly not 40% of all the gamers)

Of course, EVERYONE knows what Avatar is, and probably 95% of them (or more) have seen it. There are very, very few video games that manage to to become that well known. (Shucks, Halo and Call of Duty isn't that well known. Zelda and Mario are, though. Nintendo FTW... I guess.)

 

[ridiculon]

Man, in what universe is the average price of a movie ticket 7.95?

 

[ryukage_sama]

If you're going to use numbers to determine whether or not something is mainstream, you need to set some sort of standard. I was actually surprised to see just how close the numbers were. Statistics are not always effective for reaching qualitative conclusions. I could argue that movies aren't "mainstream" because the number of hours Americans spend each week watching movies pales in comparison to the hours spend watching television. Or that drinking a glass of milk at breakfast isn't "mainstream" because more adults drink coffee. This article makes a good case for why people should invest in movies instead of games, but it certainly doesn't argue that gaming is some kind of obscure past-time practiced by an unknown number of secretive individuals.

I would conclude that gaming is mainstream, but that isn't to say that the same can be said for each individual game or any individual movie for instance.

 

[mikespoff]

Great article, and a welcome bit of perspective on the raw numbers.

I like the issue of cultural penetration in your example of mentioning GTAIV or Avatar at a party. An augmenting factor to consider is the time investment required to familiarise yourself with the cultural touchstone: if everyone's raving about a particular movie and you feel out of the loop because you don't know what they're talking about, you can fix that with a trip to the DVD store and two hours on the couch. But if you don't know who Commander Shepard is and want to uncover the sci-fi saga of the Mass Effect games, you need about 30 hours to play through each story (assuming that you already have access to the skills and equipment to play it).

 

[vxicepickxv]

Do they sell it at Wal-Mart? If the answer is yes, then it's mainstream, and acceptable.

If they answer is no, is it because it's NOT mainstream, or because it's not acceptable?

Gaming is probably one of the most mainstream things I do, and it is, without a doubt, the most mainstream thing I do for fun.

 

[Zenron]

While I do agree with the general point of this article, the fact that games aren't as mainstream as we think and is still secluded to geek culture, but I don't think you should have mentioned call of duty. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been bored by people discussing this series. Hell, I went to a party just the other day and there was some people playing on CoD. Maybe it is a bit different where I live, but here in England, video games has become an accepted medium. Does that not make it mainstream? Do we gauge this by popularity, or by it's general acceptance? Either way that you look at it, gaming is still mainstream, it just isn't viewed as much as movies, but it's still popular.

 

[RowdyRodimus]

The Amazing Spider-Man sells around 250-300 thousand copies an issue, most of those to the same peopole every issue. Now, just because not as many people read it as have seen Avatar, Spider-Man is still more mainstream than Avatar.

You can't use numbers to judge how mainstream something is since the entire point of something being mainstream is how aware people are of what is being talked about.

 

[ItsAPaul]

Funny, everyone I know around my age plays video games of some sort, and they damn sure own at least a last gen console if not a Wii for party games or something. That's about as mainstream as you can get.

 

[MissAshley]

I'd hoped this piece would involve more than only the number side of things, which I thought many understood to be skewed in favor of promoting video gaming as mainstream. I hoped for an analysis of how far gaming has to go to obtain the level of societal acceptance and cultural assimilation as books, movies, and traditional sports.

Do they sell it at Wal-Mart? If the answer is yes, then it's mainstream, and acceptable.

If we want to use the acknowledgment of its existence by a large entity as a gauge, then I pose this question instead:

Do public schools make students aware of video games and how they have shaped society?

 

[Varun Garuda Maharaj]

Videogames don't suck that's probably why they aren't as mainstream as people think

 

[Varun Garuda Maharaj]

I'd hoped this piece would involve more than only the number side of things, which I thought many understood to be skewed in favor of promoting video gaming as mainstream. I hoped for an analysis of how far gaming has to go to obtain the level of societal acceptance and cultural assimilation as books, movies, and traditional sports.

Do they sell it at Wal-Mart? If the answer is yes, then it's mainstream, and acceptable.

If we want to use the acknowledgment of its existence by a large entity as a gauge, then I pose this question instead:

Do public schools make students aware of video games and how they have shaped society?

One of the issues mentioned that videogames are an INTEGRAL part of society

 

[Therumancer]

I think the flaw with your logic is that your not considering the "Generation X" factor and the fact that we skipped a generation. "Baby Boomers" are on their way out, but still account for most of the money and power in society and they never embraced video gaming. However the current generation, and "Generation Y" which is upcoming have. How many people are gamers and would know what your talking about with "Grand Theft Auto IV" depends on the audience. If your a Gen Xer and attending a business related party with your bosses who are likely to be Boomers, and your right only a couple of them are likely to get it (though a couple will, which is pretty outstanding since it has penetrated a little). In comparison if a Gen Xer is hanging out with people of his own generation (who can now be in their 30s like me) the odds are much, much greater.

See, before I retired on disabillity I talked to a LOT of people I worked with about video games who were around my own age. The stereotype that video games are inappropriate for "water cooler conversation" is entirely false. I have actually had conversations of the sort people joke about (murdering people in crime games, slicing up demons, etc...) with groups of co-workers at various (appropriate) times, as have a lot of people I talk to when they discuss their own experiences at their job or whatever.

One thing to consider is that the penetration of gaming can't just be measured by it's sales. While the gaming industry is concerned mostly due to greed, look at the used game industry and the number of people who buy games used. Also look at various back door methods of running games like emulators which a lot of people use, not to mention pirated Chinese hardware (just because your PS-3 says "Sony" on it doesn't mean it's a real PS-3 for example, if you got a super deal on it online, it might be a knock off, this is true of a lot of consoles and handhelds in general).

Some of the attitudes of the industry are hard to justify since they involve punishing legitimate users, and involved bad assumptions like every pirate or used game buyer purchusing the genuine article or for full price if those avenues were not open to them. The point being that the group of gamers out there is easily two, three, or even four times the size of the statistics. This is one of the reasons why the industry has such a greedgasm in trying to find ways of tapping into those people and forcing them to pay despite massive pirates.

Indeed even before consoles were as big a deal as they are now, the industry realized things were getting big enough where "water cooler piracy" was becoming a big part of their problem. People copying and burning games at work, exchanging pirate sites, or giving referances to discount electronics shopes that have these "unbelievable deals on consoles".

Of course I think the situation is complicated because of the Boomers who still represent a portion of the "Mainstream" far more than they should be doing so sociologically. The "current" generation and the upcoming one are arguably very much generations of gamers.

 

[Smokescreen]

This article gave me a good breakdown of numbers to prove its point; excellent.

But it also spent WAY too much time on that breakdown to ask a more interesting question at the end; less excellent.

"We are mainstream, hooray! People can't mock us anymore!"
Well actually...
"We aren't mainstream at all, huzza! F-you haters, you just don't get it!"

Oh FFS, let's just go play a game.

 

[Jaded Scribe]

I find your use of movie ticket sales to be as misleading as what you were trying to debunk.

Compare the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 to the opening weekend of Jon Favreau's Iron Man at the box office. GTA IV launched a few days prior to Iron Man's theatrical release, and industry types were concerned that the game would hurt the movie's sales; many potential movie visitors would be at home, having reached the McReary Brothers missions, instead of at the movies. The fear wasn't exactly unfounded. The game made $310 million during its first day, compared to the $38.7 million the movie hauled in globally during its first day in theaters. But divide those numbers by the unit price, and you get a very different picture. Considering an average theater ticket price of $7.18 in 2008, about 5.4 million people saw Iron Man the first day in theaters. Over the course of its theatrical run, that number ran up to 81 million viewers. Grand Theft Auto IV, by comparison, reached 3.5 million people on its first day of sales (assuming $60 pricepoint), and 15 million people in its lifecycle. This estimate doesn't include used game sales or playing a friend's copy of the game, but we're also not including DVD or pay-per-view revenue with Iron Man. For a rough estimate, 81 million viewers is way more than 15 million.

The problem here, that I see, is that a family of four will purchase 4 movie tickets, but (likely) only 1 copy of a game.

Without getting into used sales and friend's copies, sticking just to single households, it's hard to put together a good picture of how many people actually play a game and are being reached. Parents who were gamers in the 80s and 90s are having kids, and there's no reason they wouldn't let their kids be the same (assume age-appropriateness here).

You also don't take into account people who go to movies multiple times, paying full ticket price each time, versus one-time payment on a game.


I think the best measure of how mainstream something is has nothing to do with numbers. It's how many people are familiar with a product. If, say, 70% of a given population recognizes something, it's mainstream.