On 5/31/2019 at 2:15 PM, deltaKshatriya said:
Typically doing something new is better than doing the same thing over and over again because it's boring. Would you want to play the same game over and over again, only with shinier graphics? And this is where knowing your audience is tricky. For one, not everyone has the same opinions, and who's ultimately right?
This is a great point. -- There's this great mini-series called "The Code" that talks about mathematics in nature, and one part is about how google can predict various epidemics down to almost the _exact_ number of people affected by the flu by just tallying people's searches on particular subjects. That's easily explainable if you're a skeptic (like me) because google is notorious for data tracking and could easily be doing something in the study they didn't disclose. They're not inherently scientists after all.
Instead, a more interesting experiment (in that same movie) is the bit about the Jelly beans. When 400 people were asked about the number of jelly beans in a clear jar, the guesses were wildly off. Nobody was even close. However, when all the (seemingly-random) numbers were added up and then averaged out, the average number of jelly beans people guessed were off by almost exactly 3 jelly beans. Yes, 3. Ultimately, this proves people's issues and mindsets are vastly different, and while their crazy reasons for why they guessed what they guessed was all over the place, in the end, it all averages out. There indeed _is_ an average "atmosphere" that is possible to know and prove objectively -- and with Novelty as the basis, it makes it even easier to hone-in on which areas that people find important in games. And while this seems like magic (after all, we're each just one person), this is actually very much science.
This discussion about novelty leads me to my earlier comments about determining the "atmosphere" around games (and their players) objectively.
In our case, it is actually _because_ our industry is so novelty-driven that we have a decent advantage over other industries. We can easily identify the "average" customer specs for any game because customers and feedback on those games are plentiful, and what's different between games isn't (usually) _that_ different that we can't identify an audience's tastes from that data. The important part is that we know whether it's OUR audience we're identifying tastes for -- or not.
For example, Call of Duty has "RPG" elements in it, but it is definitely not an RPG game just because it has a leveling system. And an "RPG" is definitely not an "FPS" just because you're playing from an FPS perspective and shooting guns (i.e. Fallout 3). There are certain expectations that must be met with each of these monikers, and _those_ expectations change with their audience (and from audience to audience) over time. As a kid, Fallout would never be considered an RPG (in the time of Doom, Quake, etc.) because an "RPG" was actually what we now call a "JRPG" today.
The important part is that we struggle with identifying our audience because our nomenclature and terminology matches our audience's nomenclature and terminology -- which clearly changes over time.
It is hard to hit a target that is always moving -- especially when one lacks the proper terminology to define it.
This isn't an easy task.
In general, style can be used to define games of a certain type -- i.e. one style could consist of cute art and hard-as-nails (but-fair) gameplay, meaning you've got "Megaman 2" or "Ducktales" now. Get rid of that "(but-fair)" part, and you have "Super Meatboy" or even troll games like "I wanna be the guy", where the challenges are heavily weighted against the player and rote memory and fast reflexes are what it takes to survive. Sure, these are all cutesy 2d platformers, but these subtle-but-VERY-different, mindsets attract VERY different audiences.
So how do you strike a balance?
The right nomenclature to identify the game style we're looking to make is important in defining atmosphere objectively (but identifying the specific style of a game is what's _actually_ "hard" about determining our audience -- there are so many "styles" of games, yet there are so few labels, and the labels barely stick as time passes.) For example, is "The Witcher" an RPG, an Action or Adventure game, a Puzzle game, a Stealth game? -- All of the above is the easy answer -- but, really, it is none of the above. We just have easy (extremely subjective) labels to slap on and forget. The real answer is a LOT harder to define with our industry's current terminology.
The label(s) we pick tends to depend on which label we identify with the most or decide will drive us a bigger audience.
There is a downside to talking in game "styles" though.
Talking in "styles" is less precise than talking in "mechanics", but talking in mechanics is tedious and not great for understanding ideas. The variety is overwhelming to us mere humans.
For example -- How do we recognize each other? Starting out, we're groups of atoms defined by quantum rules. But we aren't _just_ atoms -- we're chemicals (certain atoms arranged in certain ways). But we're not quite chemicals either -- we're specific DNA sequences. Yet we're not just DNA sequences either -- we still consist of some floating atoms and some floating chemicals, both unrelated to our specific sequences of DNA. So we call ourselves "human beings" to fill in this gap. But there are just too many human beings. We're Mark or Earl or Jen or Jessica. But there are still too many of those too -- We might call two friends MarkA or MarkB in our minds, but in reality, we know them by their face and personality more than their name. Each Mark we know has a different "style" or "personality" alongside his face in his mind, and it is his personal style which sticks out so prominently to us. This overall unique personal style naturally makes them memorable to us in a sea of atoms in our universe.
It's no wonder Wind Waker bombed a bit, yet is now so unquestionably-memorable. -- It had such a distinct personality, but we didn't get to know it at the time because we just didn't like its face.
After Smash Bros arguably made Toon-Link a celebrity, we're now like "hey, I knew that guy! -- after you get over his cartoonish looks, he's actually really cool!!"
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Games ultimately need better terminology to help them visualize their personal style and scope to their audience -- and verbalize that same unique style and scope so that the atmosphere around their particular games (and players) can be analyzed objectively.
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Adding to the above, customers see companies like EA or Ubisoft way differently than two to five-man team indie developers. Players will accept failures in some places but not others, but depending on who you are, this might be forgiven easily, begrudgingly, completely, temporarily, or not at all. The only way to know this is knowing what customers you're targeting -- and why they're targeting you.
If you want to make a stylized game like WindWaker (because your artists are excellent at that kind of art, or you found a charming style you want to emulate), then look at the atmosphere surrounding stylized games at that point in time. It generally helps to see who the customers are for those types of games (i.e. children, or are adults playing them too?), then check to see how well your particular game adapts to that trend (i.e. WindWaker was kind of a "teen" game, but only young children in the US were playing cartoony games at that point in time). Conker's bad fur day was an exception to this -- and it was great -- but it was sold at the end of the N64's life, so it didn't do great -- the older audience it targeted had pretty much moved on to other consoles by that time. So that's a point too -- it isn't _just_ the audience you should consider, but what _environment_ does that audience exist in should be considered as well.
All in all -- who's "right" depends on a number of factors, including your own capabilities, the general state/mood of the player-base, and the environment in which that player-base exists (any significant change in that environment could greatly alter their perceptions of your product -- you should usually have a "Plan B" in case a change like that happens during development). Conker's bad fur day comes to mind here. The atmosphere was changing around their product -- so they changed their product to suit it. Whether or not it was a good idea to fully change the direction of the game to fit the atmosphere of the industry as a whole (rather than changing their product to better-fit their particular market) is actually a great subject for analysis, but is beyond the scope of what I'm discussing atm.
On 5/31/2019 at 4:52 PM, DavinCreed said:
There's nothing wrong with casual gamers, no matter how much the hardcore gamers seem to despise them. Not everyone has the time to play games like a full time job, and it's dumb to discriminate against people because they can't. And apparently it's good to target them.
Indeed, "casual" is not an inherently bad audience for serious devs -- it just gets beaten-up on for being misunderstood as an audience who is happy playing "Match-3 clones" or "Solitaire" on their smoke break everyday.
This stereotype isn't all there is, and I would argue that "casual" is actually an under-served audience -- i.e. I used to play games "hardcore", but I don't have time to do that anymore. I can't see paying $60 for a huge epic experience I won't have time to sit down to. I will buy one or two awesome / epic / huge titles a year sometimes, but it could take me another year or two to get through them.
Regarding Nintendo's "casual" affair:
I was only referring to the problem of using Sony's strategy to target the specific audiences it tried to target (longterm) without the wisdom of the nuances of how to execute Sony's strategy well -- especially over the longterm. A copy of a great thing is still a copy -- even great copies can miss the smaller/finer details and nuances of the source.
Eventually, copying "a good strategy" can become a lot like playing telephone.
Nintendo had only a barebones idea of what they were doing -- they saw Playstation's success, but they missed a lot of the subtle reasons _why_ Playstation was so successful. Unlike the novelty-seeking audience Nintendo targeted, Nintendo's original audience had grown up. They were very different people. Nintendo didn't want to (or maybe didn't know how to?) change with their audience. And, like anything novel -- eventually that novelty wears off. After that, only the high-quality classics (and the originals) will remain.
To target both crowds, Sony's offer of freedom to third-party developers was likely its "secret sauce" -- Nintendo wasn't terrible for not seeing it sooner, because, after all, this very same "freedom" damned the Atari systems and almost our entire industry.
Nintendo saved it almost single-handedly by way of its legendary penchant for very high-quality games like Super Mario Bros.
However, Nintendo went to the extreme with this, becoming a sort of dictator. Sony, however, suddenly provided Nintendo's aging audience (thanks to many high-quality third-party developers) with mature-themed games again on the Playstation with games like Resident Evil, FFVII, Xenogears, Twisted Metal, and leigions of others. Even during the final days of the Wii/U, Nintendo, only just on the verge of catching on, saw that their "audience" did not just include gamers -- it also included developers.
This is something we, as a community of developers, should take to heart more. -- We (developers) still provide our industry value. because it is we who provide the audiences for our industry exactly what they want. It is our JOB to learn how to do this better.
I think a discussion on the terminology we use to visualize our games (both to ourselves and to our audience) is sorely needed.
Without this, discussing the atmosphere objectively is very difficult without everyone being on the same page already.
This is why I believe smaller teams (with members who are really close friends) actually produce better games. Anyone remember World of Goo? -- That's a pretty good example of a small team who did great work (for the correct audience) because they were already on the same page. -- In cases like that, the game just kind of "puts itself together" (in a manner of speaking), doesn't it?
