[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN} Who to design for?

[Raph Koster]

Sean Howard wrote:
>
> "Raph Koster" <raph at areae.net> wrote:
>
> > Research from within EA showed that in fact hardcore gamers bought the
> > Sims, on the strength of Will's past work. They mostly disliked it, but
> > showed it to their girlfriends, and that was how it spread. It did not
> > jump to the casual market: it went through the hardcore, which is
> > classic adoption mechanics.
>
> "Showed it to their girlfriends"? Seriously? I should write a report about
> how hardcore gamers "don't bathe". That assessment seems amazingly
> anecdotal. Was this research based on case studies, questionaires, or
> statistical interpolation? I'd be interested in knowing what manner EA's
> marketing department went about getting that kind of information. Because
> it seems to me that many of the people that I know that play the Sims
> would be invisible to traditional means of data collection like that.

It was an expensive, large, highly detailed, and quite rigorous study.
Give EA some credit -- they were sitting on a truly shocking market
response, and they felt they needed to understand it. And they splurged
on trying to understand it.

The adoption vector is actually quite understandable. After all, the
game is a dollhouse simulator. The core gamer audience was, and is,
predominantly male. The core gamer response to the game mechanics was
actually fairly negative on average (you can go back and check forum
discussions from the time period in question to verify).

However, core gamers are also always on the look out for games to
recommend to non-gamers, especially their significant others, whom the
gamers want to be interested in their favorite hobby. In this case, they
did so, and the recommendation was enthusiastically adopted.

It is true that SimCity a decade prior had had some similar crossover
(though nothing in the same order of magnitude). But the crossover
audience did not then begin to haunt the game stores where The Sims was
sold. There is no adoption vector to those folks. They don't hang about
looking for the next Will Wright game. They don't even know it is
coming, because advance publicity is directed at the core gamer press.

-Raph