Well yeah, because without them the games wouldn't exist. Do you think the people that make the game happen shouldn't have serious power and say over what goes into the game they funded? I mean, if you personally invested $30 million into a project wouldn't you want some sort of control and safe guards over it?CaitSeith said:
It's not stagnating now. The majority of games are playing it safe and that's OK since a lot of other games are pushing the envelope here or there thanks to the developer's vision. Indie games are also taking big risks that wouldn't be as safe to take with AAA money. So the market is healthy right now in a way it wouldn't be if they behaved in the manners you are advocating now.
You seem to forget that F2P is a new model that is a mutation rather than stagnation. F2P IS a risk and isn't playing it safe.
Playing it safe isn't producing shit games. It's producing what people generally like. That isn't going to result in a market crash and will generate consistent growth in the market.
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People don't like COD because it's pushing some sort of envelope. They like it because it does what they like and does it well. They implement new mechanics here and there but they aren't drastically changing anything. People need to get over themselves when they think COD players aren't real gamers or aren't a legitimate part of the market segment. Shooters are real games and big business. Heck, you can play as a woman in COD now too, fyi. Because, why not?
It is a scary thing to consider but the reason why there are so many sequels aren't because companies are playing it safe but because they are insanely profitable.
I'll take it a step further. The Last of Us, one of my favorite games of all time, didn't really do anything new. What it did was take elements we know and love and perfected them. Heck, they even took the escort mission that I wish would drop off the face of the planet and made it painless for an entire game.
Yeah, regarding your edit, I've had a hard as heck time finding that. The only other things I'm finding are various studies on why women don't seem to like violent games like men do rather than studies establishing that to be true. The general conclusion (whether correct or not) seems to deal with variances empathy and aggression between genders.
The good news is that the graph I presented does still represent a legitimate difference in preference of game types by gender. Even if it's just on the iOS platform the data still presents a wide margin of difference.
While I haven't really found basic charts I have found a few articles:
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=commstudiespapers
Check out page 17 and 18 in the link. (page 515 and 516 in the paper)
It seems like all the papers I can drum up agree on a significant difference in genre preference by genre with men by far accounting for our traditional AAA titles like Shooters, Fighting games, Action Adventure games and the like. I've found a non-trivial number of studies that are behind a paywall. The abstracts coincide with the difference in genre but I don't have the data (unless I want to pay $200 for a book or start a subscription for a site). Sadly, I've been out of college for so long that I no longer have a subscription to journals repositories like jstore where I could likely have read these for free.
Publishers know this difference. They design games according to these preferences depending on the genre of game. In games that are very highly likely to be male then the protagonist will be either male or an option to choose between. In games where there is a higher liklihood for females to play then you start to only see games where you can choose between gender and even unknown protagonist gender (think something like RTS' god mode where you don't really have a gender, you are literally just you). The reason why it doesn't commonly go to just women instead of having a choice between genders is again, because of the overall consumer market of AAA games being overwhelmingly male. I would anticipate seeing more female protagonists in iOS or social games and that has anecdotally been true in the games I've looked at in a world where a Kardashian game can become a popular phone app.
I would posit that games that give players an option to choose gender of the protagonist are directly catering to women and should be recognized as such. It is disappointing to hear people trivialize those games but they allow exactly what people want and should be held in the highest esteem where diversity in gaming is concerned. What people are arguing for when they say "diversity" isn't actually diversity. What they want is for only their group to be catered to at the cost of another as some sort of balancing of scales. That's not only unethical but dishonest. Any games that allow you to play as a woman should be considered a win for diversity. But there's a TON of those so I guess people wouldn't have much to argue about after that.
This is really a fascinating area of study for me. I would love to have been a researcher if I felt like I could make a living at it. Instead, my statistics courses all had to be electives except the few that coincided with my degrees. But I certainly love picking studies apart. Please let me know if you find a decent publically available article on the subject. I did see a chart awhile back that really simply outlined the different preferences of genre by gender but have not seen it again.
EDIT: Ooh, couple fun studies:
2012 showing that men far prefer violent video games as compared to women who much prefer social games:
http://usabilitynews.org/video-games-males-prefer-violence-while-females-prefer-social/
It also gives a breakdown of genre preferences:
"Males were more likely than females to be drawn to games from the Strategy, Role Playing, Action, and Fighting genres whereas females were more likely than males to play games from the Social, Puzzle/Card, Music/Dance, Educational/Edutainment, and Simulation genres. Overall, more males than females treated video game playing as their primary hobby, while females viewed playing video games as less important than other hobbies such as watching television."
Since this mirrors the iOS chart I originally presented. It appears that preference of genre is not dependent on platform. Which means that chart applies across platform.
