Own 10 Or More Games On Steam? You Are Too Core For Many Developers

[Samuki Elm]

The problem is that video games are still too young as a medium. It's still experiencing growing pains and people in the industry not being really clear on what their industry is.

The "casual vs core gamer" debate is pointless, especially when you're basing the demographic on something as broad and inspecific as "how many games you own." It'd be like dividing the movie-watching audience based on how many movies they watch. The movie-making industry is well developed, mature, and quite methodical in its marketing and direction - the videogame industry by comparison is a bunch of pubescent teenagers jerking themselves left and right with no idea what they're doing, while being very adamant that they know best.

And this leads developers into decisions and statements that make clear that they don't really understand what their industry is. Like, say, a studio known for triple-A big-budget games being worried they're falling behind in the casual online market. "Screw making the next Half-Life, we need to make more Farmville clones!" And not realizing that though both categories fall under the heading of "games", they're completely different industries with completely different audiences and goals.

It's like a movie studio deciding to ditch making the next Lord of the Rings to focus on making viral Youtube videos. Or a book publisher giving up putting out novels in order to focus on updating their micro-blogs. Yes, technically, movies and Youtube videos are both "moving pictures with sound." And novels and Twitter posts are both "words that mean things." But the differences are quite obvious, and those industries are mature enough and well-developed enough that the suits making the business decisions aren't stupid enough to throw away success in one to pursue vague ideas in the other.

But our beloved industry is still quite young - and stupid. We're just a bunch of horny teenagers, jumping onto anything and tossing into the wind.

 

[EricMcArthur]

Why do they bother holding a GDC any more?

 

[Telefonegun]

This developers attempt to be witty fails at the start. You don't actually own any of your games on Steam, it is just ongoing subscription for your games. So according to him no-one using Steam is a core gamer.

 

[runic knight]

So lets see if I get this right here. People who buy more games more often don't matter because they aren't the largest group, but mobile platform isn't casual and it is divisive to look at it that way.

Well, gee, if you want to alienate people who buy more of your product more often compared to a slightly larger pool of far less likely buyers, you are going the right way. Can't imagine why you would intentionally piss on the group more likely to give you more money overall (someone who buys more games is far more likely to be a repeat customer, compared to the less-than-ten demographic which will always inherently shrink if they are buying your game) but hey, good job and keep up the good work. You'll but enough bullets into that foot yet.

 

[nintendoeats]

"Even if you get all core gamers together in a room, they don't agree on what the term means," she said. "That limits the form, and it limits innovation."

These are two contradictory ideas. If you get 10 engineers in a room, confirm that they agree about everything and then send them off individually to design a bridge then they will come back with a maximum of 3 different-but-similar designs. If they disagree about everything, you will get 10 wildly varying designs. Some of them might be rubbish, but even those might contain useful new ideas. In fact, if none of them are rubbish then that suggests that nobody is trying anything unusual.

Lets try an alternate version of this sentence:

"Even if you get all core gamers together in a room, they don't agree on what the term means," she said. "That broadens the form, and it encourages innovation."

Which of those sentences sounds more coherent? I presume that this person is intelligent because otherwise she wouldn't be where she is today. However, she clearly wasn't on her logical A-game when she formulated these ideas.

 

[Strazdas]

I think we should inform CDC. I think there is a virus being spread in San Francisco that makes everyone from there speak the most stupid garbage possible in public. We need to isolate it before it spreads.

Its always funny how the most unknown, irrelevant developers tend to be the most full of themselves assholes to their audience. the only guy that pulled this off was Phil Fish and he had to quit the industry to do it!

At what point did GDC become such a shitshow? I mean, I'm sure there's still some decent stuff going on there, but in previous years all I hear from it are mobile developers either 1) trying to denigrate PC/console gamers and 2) talking about the best way to milk "whales" and psychologically screw with people to get their micro-monies.

I mean, was it always this bad or is there something I'm missing?

It was like that at least since 2012 when i started following what was happening at conferences.

GDC is basically E3, but for failures.

Despite the fact that Warhammer as a setting is immensely refreshing for a Total War game, Tech Tree and interface are basically a carbon copy with different paint taken from Atilla and Rome2.

Its same engine. Total War series always used same engine for 3-4 games where the main difference was setting and new paintjob. This was happening with Total War series since 2003 at least.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Snip

Ah, that makes more sense. I guess clickbait and appealing to outrage culture strikes again.

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." -Winston Churchill

 

[Politrukk]

I think we should inform CDC. I think there is a virus being spread in San Francisco that makes everyone from there speak the most stupid garbage possible in public. We need to isolate it before it spreads.

Its always funny how the most unknown, irrelevant developers tend to be the most full of themselves assholes to their audience. the only guy that pulled this off was Phil Fish and he had to quit the industry to do it!

At what point did GDC become such a shitshow? I mean, I'm sure there's still some decent stuff going on there, but in previous years all I hear from it are mobile developers either 1) trying to denigrate PC/console gamers and 2) talking about the best way to milk "whales" and psychologically screw with people to get their micro-monies.

I mean, was it always this bad or is there something I'm missing?

It was like that at least since 2012 when i started following what was happening at conferences.

GDC is basically E3, but for failures.

Despite the fact that Warhammer as a setting is immensely refreshing for a Total War game, Tech Tree and interface are basically a carbon copy with different paint taken from Atilla and Rome2.

Its same engine. Total War series always used same engine for 3-4 games where the main difference was setting and new paintjob. This was happening with Total War series since 2003 at least.

From my memory the changes used to be quite big in comparison to what they are now, I'm not just talking about the engine I mean the actual design/layout and even music composition.

From Rome 1 tot Medieval 1 we had huge jumps gameplay wise, from Medieval to Empire the same, Napoleon was more a glorified expansion pack for Empire the same as that Medieval had 3 expansion packs.
Empire to Shogun was a huge leap again.

Ever since Shogun however we've sort of been working with the same look/feel design and only very minor alterations to fit the setting.

 

[sumanoskae]

Art isn't a fucking social movement, video games aren't people in need of equal rights - nobody who values their credibility as a critic is going to argue that Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore are the same form of entertainment.

Video games cover a much broader spectrum of experiences than any other art form I can think of - we just haven't reached a point where we agree on how to categorize all these things yet. That doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be categorized.

The reason so many serious gaming studios don't dismiss the aforementioned audience is because they aren't fucking toy stores; they're artists, and they want their audience to appreciate their work as much as they do.

And yes, there is a world of difference in the perspective of somebody who occasionally plays games for fun and somebody with a true and deep love of the medium.

 

[Benny Blanco]

As someone whose Steam portfolio puts him squarely in the 1%, I would say that anyone with more than 10 Steam games has probably seen a Steam sale and made a brief cost/benefit analysis of what their cash would get them against the shallow samey repetition of a pay-to-play game. The only mobile game I have ever spent money on was Fallout Shelter, largely because anything Fallout-related has a nasty tendency to bypass the rational part of my brain in a way usually associated with Class A drugs.

Games are art, but not all art is equal, and not all art is enjoyed by the same audiences. Music is an art form, but I like some pieces of music and hate others. Paintings are art, but whilst Rothko leaves me cold, I like Chagall and Escher.

Moreover, consumers of the art get to choose our level of engagement: my girlfriend enjoys boardgames, Cards Against Humanity and plays the shit out of Candy Crush, but short of Civ 5 and Never Alone I have been largely unable to interest her in other videogames and she certainly doesn't self-identify as a gamer.

There is nothing wrong with having different tastes, and nothing wrong with someone who sells art trying to segment their market properly, but I am sick of people deciding that the arbitrary categories they create are profoundly unhelpful. I think the statement could have been worded substantially better: the "Core" are people who are already aware of the art and have at least a passing familiarity with it. When a new game is designed for the casual market, they are therefore not the core demographic. Mobile games target a market of "new" players, like my GF, who don't have experience with complex and demanding interfaces built over years of regular play with a range of games. They are designed to look nice, be simple to pick up and bring the player back for more at short intervals of regular play.

I don't think I necessarily departed too much from what Cook may have meant to say, but see how much less offensive that was? FFS, man, you are dealing with a notoriously sensitive demographic who just tore the arse out of an industry press who dissed them. Choose your words a little more carefully, could you?

For the record, I think the characterisation of people who own a lot of games as "novelty seekers" is both irrelevant and potentially inaccurate. As an Indie game maker, novelty is just about your best USP after nostalgia. Why would you discourage it?