Xzi said:
because one of the things we want to do is really try and broaden our appeal, broaden our reach, sell more units, get more fans.
Well we all know what happened to DA2 when they started talking like this. FYI, Bioware, turning RPGs into action-adventure games does NOT broaden your appeal, it just alienates your base and gets a resounding meh from everyone else.
It's like this, nerds and geeks represent a solid audience that can bring in a pretty heavy profit.
The sheeple brought into the market nowadays however outnumber us by a substantial number. Sales to them, outperform sales to us. The basic attitude is one where the guys running the gaming industry figure they would rather give up a solid audience, for a potentially bigger audience, to make more money. There is no loyalty to consumers, and we're seeing that applies to the game industry. Right now, much like bands that "sell out we're seeing developers insisting they don't owe the users that made them what they are anything. All they care about is adding another wing to their giant castle made of money. We all hoped that things would be differant from an industry that for so many years said "hey, we're nerds and gamers just like you guys", but well... we are where we are. We're not the first group of consumers to get stabbed in the back by those we trusted and supported.
With simple games like "Farmville" showing what an appeal to a casual audience can mean in terms of profits of course game developers want that money. Having a billion dollars in profit seems pretty lame when you see that maybe you could be making tens of billions of dollars in profit. It's also not unnoticed that the sellingest games of all time right now are shooters. People are looking at how much people hate Bobby Kotick and his people, yet how they line up to pay them for the latest "Call Of Duty" game. This causes people in the industry to have their eyes rolls around like a slot machine, end up on dollar signs, before burying a knife up to it's hilt in the back of their current fan base and running off road-runner style after those potential profits.
In short, reality bites, and where the game industry was a haven for all things geek, I think it's not going to be that way much longer. As I said in another post, if you look at what the lowest common denominator watches on TV, it's sitcoms, crime/cop shows, and things like that. A science fiction/fantasy property that achieves mass appeal is pretty uncommon. Games like "the Sims" have sitcoms pretty well covered, so it's not surprising we see game companies looking at other generes that the everyman finds appealing, because if they can sell to them, they cna make more money than by selling to us. Previously there was a sort of wall of technological accessibility in the way, and it took a fairly smart person to even be able to play games, and smarter people tend to be more attracted to "geek" entertainment. With that barrier down, now the gaming industy seems to be headed in the direction of TV studios in wanting to recycle only what the ratings show will sell, and that means endless sequences of crime/spy shows and sitcoms and similar kinds of material.
I will post some very judgemental, and not very flattering posts about the subject, but at the same time I also realize there is little I, or anyone, can do to stop it, other than hold up a mirror. Of course with all of that money coming in, it's just like any other group selling out, "we don't owe you anything", and it's easy to keep right on saying that as long as the big checks keep coming in. Big piles of dollars will soothe the most damaged consciences. Unlike some situations where people like me will point out possible violent solution that people won't embrace for a variety of reasons I won't go into, even extreme responses don't work in cases like this because you can't really force a creative process. If you could, rather than paying famous and prolific writers like Steven King big bucks, publishing companies would probably just have books written by sweat shop workers in third world countries under the threat of torture... you can do rote production that way (and people do), but you can't really see things created that way.
