weirdee said:
There used to be more room in the market, but they were literally shoved out of the pool by AAA practices, so the pool does seem to have a limit, and things will have to be swapped out for others unless the pool was expanded somehow, but there's an ongoing issue where any new space is immediately occupied by AAA after it becomes viable. It's not as cut and dried as it sounds. There is no motivation or room for diversity without another expansion or purge.
Well.
I don't mean to be inherently disagreeable, but... I kind of disagree.
The AAA games industry has been a pretty stark and awful force against diversity of virtually any kind, but the corporate effort to make video games a For Boys thing has been going on since the end of the 1970s. Back in that time, the common marketing knowledge for entertainment was that you sold to The Family. You can look back and see advertisements for arcade cabinets, home consoles, even Lego sets that all featured men, women, girls and boys playing with their products.
Around the 80s, marketing's trend of focusing on individuals really started getting out of control, and pretty soon all the presumption of girls playing video games completely disappeared without any real explanation- other than that we had been told, very subtly, that this was the case by marketing people with a mission. Everything that's happened since then has been the legacy of more and more aggressive, cynical focus-grouping market-testing bilge.
So while that doesn't refute the idea that AAA is not filling the bill, there's two reasons why I still think the idea of a purge is inherently bad:
1. AAA gaming is Hollywood. They will never get anything right. You can't trust them with nuance because they can't
do nuance. Even on the off chance that they manage something with some finesse, it has to be within their comfort zone in one way or another because the lumbering colossus that is that finance machine just can't make those tight turns. So even if we managed to convince them to focus on the rest of us, they'd merely scrutinize us with that same awful microscope, boil down the elements of what we like, and regurgitate that at us endlessly in ways that completely cheapen it. So trust me when I say that leaving the Dumb Market to the Dumb Consumer is a blessing in disguise, even if it doesn't seem like it.
2. The backlash. Look how much counter-culture has already happened despite how little ground we've made. Can you imagine how much worse it would get in light of something like that? I mean it would be worth it if that would get us something great, but as I explained in number 1, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Honestly, the expansion angle is the only way we're getting anywhere, and that doesn't involve throwing people out of the pool. We've gotta convince more people to get in.