266: We Are Not Mainstream

[Twilight_guy]

Well yeah games are not mainstream yet but they are more mainstream and if some current trends keep up then they may someday be completely mainstream. I know a lot of gamers are scared/angry about this but I really have no idea why. Would people not looking funny at you anymore be so bad? Would being able to discuss some common game theme with just about anyone be so bad? Are you physically hurt if everyone not just a select few play games? I hope that games can someday be mainstream but I know that gaming has quiet a bit of work to do before it can reach that point and will only if it wants to.

 

[ThisNewGuy]

In my opinion, there are so many loopholes to the statistics and how they're used in this article that it's hard to take it seriously. But I do agree with the author's overall point. I don't think video games are as mainstream as we'd like to believe, but in my opinion, that's all very trivial. Being mainstream and having high quality are two very different things. So from a consumer's perspective, meh. And from a businessman's point of view, mainstream shmamstream, money is money, and video games make more than movies (especially after 2014).

 

[Yosarian2]

Eh. One thing the author is overlooking is that the gaming market is more divided then the movie market.

Almost anyone can go out and watch Avatar. But in gaming, there are fairly segregated communities; people who play modern warfare 2 are probably not the same people playing World of Warcraft, which are not the same people who are playing sports games, or casual games, or single player RPG's like Skyrim, or strategy PC games, or indie games, or social wii games, ect. The video game community is a bunch of small fairly segregated communities; just because no one game gets the same mass market as a few blockbuster movies do, doesn't mean that games in general aren't popular.

Also; it's kind of odd that you're excluding "casual gamers" who only buy one or two games, but ARE including on the movie side people that bought one DVD for ten bucks this year.

 

[thepyrethatburns]

The last paragraph says it all. Now that gaming has got it's long-sought acceptance, gamers are coming face-to-face that being a gamer doesn't make them special and never did. This is just more of the hipster rhetoric that previously manifested itself in the whole hardcore/casual debate.

Also, just to point out one really major flaw, people may not understand the GTA IV references but a lot of people also don't know Citizen Kane references. (Hell, having not liked GTA IV, I wouldn't understand what someone was talking about beyond "You feed Roman....a lot.") Just because people may not understand the references in one example of an activity doesn't mean that the entire activity is somehow counter-culture.

 

[AdumbroDeus]

The last paragraph says it all. Now that gaming has got it's long-sought acceptance, gamers are coming face-to-face that being a gamer doesn't make them special and never did. This is just more of the hipster rhetoric that previously manifested itself in the whole hardcore/casual debate.

Also, just to point out one really major flaw, people may not understand the GTA IV references but a lot of people also don't know Citizen Kane references. (Hell, having not liked GTA IV, I wouldn't understand what someone was talking about beyond "You feed Roman....a lot.") Just because people may not understand the references in one example of an activity doesn't mean that the entire activity is somehow counter-culture.

Pretty much this, and denying the mainstreaming of gaming ultimately does more disservie then good.