"It's easy to dismiss the most avid gamers as a vocal minority. They obsess over games before they're released and then often savagely rip apart the very thing they were so eagerly anticipating. They argue passionately about the most minor of details, and they demand to be catered to by developers."
with that statement came the counter-point:
"But those same people buy multiple titles every month and can be powerful opinion makers who influence the mass market. "Grand Theft Auto," for instance, would never have become a cultural touchstone if not for the hardcore gamer's seal of approval."
With the success of games like Guitar Hero, The Sims, the Nintendo Wii console system, and most recently Spore, a game which more discerning gamers including myself disavowed due to the relative lack of challenge, it was only a matter of time before this argument started to appear.
Though it may come as a surprise to most people, I agree with the first statement far more than the second one. Hardcore gamers really don't matter, or at least not as much as they think they do. It could be argued that they are more experienced than the mas market, and can provide better feedback as to quality and potential problems. While that could be true in theory, if find the statement "They argue passionately about the most minor of details, and they demand to be catered to by developers." to be extremely accurate. Enter almost any forum for a larger game developer and what you will find over and over again is an insane group of people trying to out shout via text anyone with an opposing viewpoint. Minor flaws and disagreements are subject to an emotional and exaggerated response, and there is often written a statement which suggests that not heeding a fans "warning" will somehow lead to the immediate downfall of a company.
Epic games is a good example of this. After several successful hits involving the Unreal Tournament, they chose to primarily focus on consoles with games like Gears of War and now Gears of War 2. Now look at any forum catering to PC gamers, and you would think that Cliffy B had snuck into these peoples homes and impregnated their sister.
Another fairly recent example would be Blizzard Entertainments Diablo 3. There has been some discussion recently amongst fans that the color palette used by Blizzard is to light, and takes away from the Macabre feel of previous games in the series. Fans even started a petition online asking Blizzard to scrap their current approach. In what possibly was one of the funniest responses to complaints I have ever seen, Blizzard's environmental artists, when learning of the petition, went into one of the darkest areas in Act I and painted rainbows across it, then releasing screen shots of it as if it were real. Furthering my statement regarding the lunacy of a "devoted" few, someone analyzed the light refraction angle, and told us why from that angle seeing a rainbow would actually be impossible. Oh yeah, and it was upside down because the colors were reversed. Don't believe me? Click here
Now it's not that more devoted gamers opinions aren't valid, its in getting that opinion to the developer in a constructive manner that the issue seems to arise. Where as in smaller niche companies such as Tilted Mill, open forums can work and there is a lot of interaction between fans and developers, companies with larger audiences are going to have to find ways of separating the few from the many in order to get a valid opinion. Methods like in game methods of submitting suggestions, questionnaires limiting the scope of someones response to the information needed, and separate forums available only to beta testers are methods that have shown merit.
In closing, I think "hardcore" gamers need to remember that taken as a whole they probably comprimise less than 5% of a games potential market. Now take the total sum of idiots flaming forums, and you have less than 1%. So where as your opinion may be valid, the success or failure of a company will most likely not depend on it.
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