107 replies to this topic

[Net Gnome]

The average gamer is in their mid to late 30s

I'm really interested to see where you heard that

http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

[way2lazy2care]

The average gamer is in their mid to late 30s

I'm really interested to see where you heard that

http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

edit: well played ninja... well played.

[Net Gnome]

The average gamer is in their mid to late 30s

I'm really interested to see where you heard that

http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

edit: well played ninja... well played.

jinx!

[swiftcoder]

Perhaps... but why did they target the 15-22 year old audience, when the 30+ audience is much much larger?

What exactly makes you think that Angry Birds, Draw Something, and Modern Warfare 3 are aimed at the 15-22 year-old audience?

My impression of both Angry Birds and Draw Something is that they aim fairly indiscriminately for the 55% of gamers who play on a mobile device (regardless of age). I certainly know 30+ year-olds who play both of the above.

As for MW3, I can't speak directly as to the age of the average player, but most of the players I know are young working professionals - those of us in a suitable income bracket to drop $500/year on console gaming.

[Net Gnome]

Perhaps... but why did they target the 15-22 year old audience, when the 30+ audience is much much larger?

What exactly makes you think that Angry Birds, Draw Something, and Modern Warfare 3 are aimed at the 15-22 year-old audience?

Never said they were. My position is pointed at the gaming industry at large. Though i would say the majority of the marketing for MW3 is targeted at 15-22 yr olds as thats how the ads come across: juvenile.

I would say Angry Birds did well since it -didn't- target a specific age group, and generalized its marketing to "people who enjoy fun".

[J03_b]

http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

That's interesting but I find that average age really hard to believe. I don't know how they gathered this info, but I do know that 100% of the kids 16 or young who play any game rated M either lie about their age online or have their parents buy for them. I know from personal experience a large percentage of players on games I have played are in that 15-22 group


But to answer your original post, they probably target the younger group just because they are so much easier to fool

[Hodgman]

What exactly makes you think that Angry Birds, Draw Something, and Modern Warfare 3 are aimed at the 15-22 year-old audience?

On this note, the only person I know who plays Angry Birds is my 50+ year old mother. No other game has ever really captured her attention (not for my lack of trying), but somehow Angry Birds was polished and presented in just the right way for her.

I find that average age really hard to believe. I don't know how they gathered this info, but I do know that 100% of the kids 16 or young who play any game rated M either lie about their age online or have their parents buy for them.

Going back to the earlier theme that the marketing department has a much larger budget than the actual developers --- how much personal information do you think you can buy for $100,000,000?
Imagine for a moment that every service you've ever used, every shop you've visited and every bill issued is part of an elaborate secret spy network more efficient than the Stasi -- that thought is not far from the truth.
These people have been collecting stats on the general public for so long that from a single trip to the shopping mall, they can fairly accurately guess your gender, age, industrial aptitudes, relationship status, etc... They can even guess that you're pregnant before you even know for yourself, or tell when your 18-yr old has 'borrowed' your credit card, or guess when you're likely cheating on your wife! It's really not beyond them to guess the age of a consumer...
This part of the business is probably much more refined, efficient and accurate than the software development part of the business

Anyway, it's not that hard to believe. If we go with the stereotype that only teenagers (say, 15yrs) become gamers, and assume the first "batch" of gamers started with the N.E.S. in 1985, then this first batch would be 42 by now. If every year, a new batch of 15yr old gamers is created, then we've got 27 batches, ranging from 15-42yrs old, with an average age of around 30.

[Aeroga]

It seems like the hardest part in this industry is to get that lucky break. Like angry birds, if it was never popular, where would it be? Then after you hit it big, you can sell anything, be it a repackaging like MW3, COD Black Ops, etc and it will be a worldwide phenomenon. I really wish people would stop believing in commercials. I'm guilty myself though.

[Alpha_ProgDes]

It's like they don't even know who their main audience is... They always target the easy blatant demographics.

Maybe the problem is that you think you're their main audience?

Damnit, I can't upvote you!

[Alpha_ProgDes]

Overrated: Super Mario Bros.

Why? Because a plumber jumping on mushrooms and shells can't be that revolutionary. Unless you have a something against wildlife.



Yes, I'm joking..

[J-dog]

I think a thread like this is always going to subject to lots of subjective opinions and that's alright. CoD and angry birds are what they are, and I don't feel the need to comment on them anymore. There really isn't anything too complex about these games.

But sometimes I feel like a game can feel overrated if you just miss the boat, so to speak. For example, halo and gears of war - I played both on PC a while after they came out and they felt a bit generic and dull? I have friends who love those games and I've asked them what's so good about them, and they've never really given me proper reasons.

And while I'm at this, Far cry! I hated that game! Sure, it looked nice, and the stalky jungle stuff was OK until the mutant monkeys started running around, and then there was that ridiculous "storyline" where you chase some hoe around an island and every time you find her she just tells you to do more stuff. Bleh!

But yes, games are like any media... you're always going to have a sea of turds with a few gems in between, and it makes the good ones all the more special. People will complain ad nauseum about movies, music and games they don't like, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's fun to rant a bit, and I'm personally guilty of over-analysing games too much sometimes.

Sometimes the masses seem really stupid - and often they are - but meh, I don't think it's too stupid that some guy who doesn't consider himself a monocle-wearing gaming connoisseur can enjoy a mindless round of CoD after work. Or angry birds on his phone.

[asdzxc]

For me there are a few contenders, but the first that comes to mind has to be Halo 1.

I just couldn't understand the near universal praise that game generated, not to mention the legions of rabid fanboys it spawned.

As I was playing that game, all I could think of was how "average" it was, and in many parts, below average - especially the level named "The Library" which must be considered guilty of the most egregious use of copy and paste level design I have yet witnessed; they even had to resort to putting little arrows on the ground in case you got lost within its maze of repetitively used features.

Also, enemy variation was extremely weak, many enemies re-appeared as simple re-colored variants of identical types in later levels.

Next up would be Bioshock, another game that generated near universal praise - of course I respect it for its design and setting but the actual gameplay felt weak, zap that guy then whack him over the head basically for most of the game. Not a bad game sure, but I definitely feel it was over-rated

Lastly Half-Life 2 - Once again I felt this was just another semi-decent game, nothing particularly special. Sound design was weak and many levels were far to "boxy" - it didn't have the world design quality of something like Doom 3 for example, which used actual 3d models for much of it's world geometry. Of course one can't forget it having yet another cliff hander ending, which still hardly explains anything.

So yeah, that's my 3 contenders, with Halo 1 being at the top, not saying they are horrible games, just way over-rated in my opinion.

[Alpha_ProgDes]

Halo was revolutionary for the console. PC gamers pretty much just eyerolled the whole affair. Disclosure, I'm a console gamer.

[phantom]

I think my whole problem with threads like this is that the term 'over rated' has become grounded in some sort of intellectual and snobbish elitism.

"I didn't like the game but the masses did but I'm better than the masses therefore the game must be over rated!".

Lines of thought like that are bullshit.

If millions of people the world over buy, enjoy and continue to enjoy a game it's hardly "over rated".

People enjoy different things for different reasons and will rate them on their own personal levels of enjoyment - if lots of people enjoy it and rate it highly then maybe it's rated just right?

[J03_b]

"I didn't like the game but the masses did but I'm better than the masses therefore the game must be over rated!".

Yep that's called being a hipster. That is a very common stigma and yes its very snooty or gay as I would call it.

But you might be missing the point of the posts here, which is that the games listed are rated higher than they deserve. Whether it's clear that there are much more fun games out there or the developers just put in little effort. You're suggesting the rating scale should include only personal enjoyment relative to anything else you would have, while we're suggesting it should be based on what you could have. You have to compare it to something, why not other games?

[swiftcoder]

You have to compare it to something, why not other games?

The problem with that, is that everyone in this discussion has the advantage of 50/50 hindsight.

Halo has been raised as an example, and one has to remember that even though it doesn't compare well to more modern shooters, it brought huge innovations to the field: it was the first popular shooter to drastically limit weapon loadouts, the first with a recharging health mechanic, etc...

[Bacterius]

But you might be missing the point of the posts here, which is that the games listed are rated higher than they deserve.

What Phantom means is that "deserve" is subjective. Arguing about subjective things is... not objective. Fun and edifying, sure, but not objective. Everyone is entitled to their opinion (as the three pages, soon to be four of this thread illustrate) but whether any opinion is more valid than another is a meaningless question because subjectivity cannot be quantified nor compared.

So when a game that you feel should only get 6/10 gets rated 9/10 from various major review publishers all over the world, what does that tell you? It tells you that all those reviewers (and by consequence, probably many people) have a different opinion about the game than you and value it higher (subjectively) than you do. Whether the game "deserves" it is meaningless - you can only state "I believe the game did not deserve this rating" and comparatively other people may state "I believe this game definitely did deserve its rating". But saying "this game does/does not deserve this rating" doesn't actually say anything, it has no meaning. It's like reference frames.

As for estimating a game rating from various sources such as "what I thought I would get", "what I've seen before", "what I wanted to see", "what I did not expect", etc... I guess it all depends on consistency, remember that you can only compare results if they are obtained in a consistent manner. You don't change the rules midway through the experiment. Also, objective comparison is only definable on quantities, not on qualities. It's like saying "yellow is better than blue". However typically when you compare a game to another (as in comparing it quickly, mentally, not by going through an elaborate process of extracting a grade out of ten for various aspects of the game and mashing them up into a single digit rating), you will be looking at qualities and not quantities, such as "this is an open-world game, while the other is a FPS" or "this game used innovative, interactive storytelling while the other simply laid out the plot in the form of cutscenes". How do you compare these quantities objectively? The answer: you can't. Instead you go through the process of "quantifying" different parts of the game consistently to obtain some kind of rating, which you can then compare. But that isn't perfect either - the 1-dimensional rating (usually just a scalar, like 1 to 10) is often derived from multidimensional data, which means a crapload of information is lost at the end of the process. There are many ways to minimize this but they all suck to some extent.

Anyway what I'm basically saying is that objective comparison isn't a trivial matter and if you don't do it carefully then it is devoid of meaning. And subjective comparison is inherently meaningless to anybody other than yourself (in the strictest sense; it can still be enjoyable to read and argue about, it's not like we're logic freaks)

Let the war begin.

[J03_b]

What Phantom means is that "deserve" is subjective. Arguing about subjective things is... not objective. Fun and edifying, sure, but not objective. Everyone is entitled to their opinion (as the three pages, soon to be four of this thread illustrate) but whether any opinion is more valid than another is a meaningless question because subjectivity cannot be quantified nor compared.

So when a game that you feel should only get 6/10 gets rated 9/10 from various major review publishers all over the world, what does that tell you? It tells you that all those reviewers (and by consequence, probably many people) have a different opinion about the game than you and value it higher (subjectively) than you do. Whether the game "deserves" it is meaningless - you can only state "I believe the game did not deserve this rating" and comparatively other people may state "I believe this game definitely did deserve its rating". But saying "this game does/does not deserve this rating" doesn't actually say anything, it has no meaning. It's like reference frames.

Firstly I should have been more clear in my posting. I know that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but in short I meant to imply that if only the general public were informed of other games then I'm pretty positive that a large percentage of players of the games I call overrated would have different opinions. I mean everyone on here is informed enough to know where to find fun games that will be more worth their money(yes even in their opinion) than buying the same Call of Duty game 3 times. I'm not suggesting that anyone's opinion should be different because of my knowledge, but I'm suggesting many people's would be if they shared our knowledge. And assuming that is true, then it's not unreasonable to say that the Call of Duty games don't deserve to be the top-selling games of all time, is it? (even though I know they earned their popularity fair and square by manipulating and taking advantage of the general public)


But also, by noting our conflicting ideas on the proper rating scale of video games, I acknowledged the fact that even we informed players may have different opinions about some things and then simply explained my opinion because he seemed interested.


Jeez can't you guys just interpret deep inner meanings in my posts

[swiftcoder]

I mean everyone on here is informed enough to know where to find fun games that will be more worth their money(yes even in their opinion) than buying the same Call of Duty game 3 times.

I have played (and enjoyed) every game in the Call of Duty franchise. So have pretty much all of my friends.

They may not be the best games of all time, but when it comes to ego shooters, they are pretty damn good, and well worth the $60. And yes, I'm even counting MW3 in that. And no, I don't feel it's just an overpriced map-pack.

My point is that even the 'informed' don't universally feel that these games are 'overrated'. There is a certain hipster elitism at play in here that is distasteful...

[J03_b]

yeah right your opinions wrong

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