[MUD-Dev2] Fallen Earth

[Mike Sellers]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:47 AM, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "Mike Sellers" <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:
>
> > A common mistake in core gamers: thinking the WoW audience is "the broad
> > market" or "the lowest common denominator." ?It's not. ?It's a large
> > market, certainly, but it's *far* from being anything like mass market.
>
> It is the lowest common denominator of gamer tendencies.

I guess I'm a lot less interested in "gamer" tendencies per se than I
am "the interests of people who play games" -- a much larger, more
varied set.

> ...
> Casual gamers, on the other hand, see gaming as a diversion. You can't
> consider them the lowest common denominator because there is no common
> denominator to judge by. They don't reliably play games.

They do, but you have to look at things differently, from a non-gamer
POV.  This is a bit like how the auto industry used to say, "women
don't buy cars."  It turns out they do, but you have to consider the
product and its sales from a non-white-male POV.

Casual gamers play games *very* reliably, if you provide a game they
like.  There are some common factors in the kinds of games people will
play online, though there are areas that remain largely unmapped --
lots of good actual *game design* (rather than refinements on an
existing theme) to be done there!

> You can't predict
> what they'll play. They'll play one game for ten years and never look at
> another one. They play games that are pre-installed on their computer and
> little else. You'd think that with fifty million people playing a casual
> game, there'd be some common thread as to WHY they play it or how to
> replicate its success, but it ultimately comes down to availability and
> boredom and you can't aim for that

That's really just not the case, though I can see how it might look
like it from a core-gamer POV.  Many companies have been very
successful predicting what casual games people will play over the past
couple of years.  Not 100% of the time, but then that's true with any
entertainment form.

Online games are evolving very, very rapidly, and the more I look at
it the more it looks like "heavy MMOs" (retail box, multi-gigabyte
install, etc.) are, while not headed for extinction, definitely headed
for (if not in) niche status.  That's fine, I don't mean it as a
negative; it's still a strong market with a lot left to be done in it.
 But the time when MMOs were the primary way people played online
games together is past.  The point now isn't making a "WoW-killer" or
even something that can co-exist with WoW.

The reality is that the large majority of people playing multiplayer,
persistent-world online games now have never played WoW and have no
desire to do so.  That's a development that I find fascinating. :)

Mike Sellers