Steve Waltz said:
I was three minutes in on this video before I turned it off because of how misguided the person who made it is. Who cares if my mom that plays Farmville qualifies as a gamer in these results? If AAA publishers start thinking that nearly half of gamers are female maybe then they'd broaden their view from solely Call of Duty. Not to say Call of Duty is a bad series, but when its influence is affecting things like the Resident Evil series, it's becoming a problem. Marketing Departments and Publishers are off the tracks right now and if a lie like this (if it even is a lie) can set them back to where they should be then I'm ALL for it. Does the guy that made this video call himself a "gamer?" Because, I swear, it blows my mind that a gamer would be so sour about something a video game lobbyist is lying about, unless he's a truth fanatic like Phoenix Wright and is willing to throw his own client in jail because he's guilty. Is a "gamer" willing to throw video games under the bus because game lobbyists aren't telling the truth? Lobbyists do things that would benefit their representatives; why on Earth would a "gamer" try to rebut this report? It's 100% positive news -- Truth or not.
Thank you, buddy. Egotistical "hardcore gamers" are the reasons I don't even call myself a "gamer" anymore. To them, a gamer is someone that plays games they like, because only those games are what make you a "gamer." Back in high school I was dating a girl that played video games for a hobby, but she wouldn't be considered a "gamer" because she played things like Maplestory, Neopets and Gaia Online (stuff that I [stubbornly] never got into). Now that Smart phones exist and iOS has a whole bunch of similar games she's probably playing those right now, but NOPE! She's still not a gamer because those games aren't REALLY games! Not to say all hardcore gamers are egotistical, but there's so much arrogance floating around there I feel it's best to avoid the whole situation.
In that first paragraph you highlight the problem, then ignore it entirely for the sake of harping on "hardcore gamers" or "the industry". Think about it not like gamers, but rather audience. Someone who plays FarmVille, no matter if you count them as gamers or not, is unlikely to play Dark Souls, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Mass Effect..or whatever else big series you want to look at. Each game has its audience because of its genre, as well as certain gameplay aspects of a certain game. Why should the industry try to get Farmville Players interested in CoD, or market it towards them? Why should games have to bend over backwards to include the "casual" or "female" element, or the "hardcore" and "male" for that matter? Genres exist and by definition are targetted towards an audience. First person shooters? Targetted at people who like First person shooters. Strategy? Its for people who like strategy.
How would you market a game like Civilization, Call of Duty, Europa Universalis or Mass Effect to people who play Farmville or Bejeweled on their iPhone? How would you market those games for "men" or "women"? Or for "casual" and "hardcore" respectively? Those are just variables, whether someone plays 20 hours a week or 5 hours a week differs from person to person. If you play solely one game, play very little of it comparatively and dont really care about the medium at large, then you are a casual gamer. If you devote a large part of your free time to it and generally care for gaming as a whole, you are a hardcore gamer, or a "Hobbyist" as it were. And gender is irrelevant because again, tastes differ there. Not all women like the same things. Same goes for men.
Why should you have to market it for them? Why do they matter? They are a potential audience of people playing games, yes, but they are not by default the same audience as the people who buy Madden yearly, or CoD. If you start thinking of "gamers" as a giant whole, as a single large audience that will buy your game, no matter its themes or genre, then you already failed at making a good game. Because not everyone is interested in CoD, or Farmville, or Bejeweled or..whatever. Tastes differ, the audience differs, make a game for the sake of making a game. If its good, the audience flocks to it by itself, but you dont have to lure them in somehow with half-baked efforts to reel in people who probably arent interested in those titles.
