Hey guys, long time no post. Glad to be back.
So this is a dead horse that has received more than its fair share of beatings, but I think I have a pretty unique perspective to give on this. The field I work in deals a lot with art and consumer/business relations. Whether or not you think of video games as art you should treat the business/consumer relationship the way you'd treat it in an art field as opposed to a technical field and here is why; the kinds of feedback video game developers and designers receive and act upon is currently mixed in a way that is potentially harmful to other consumers and potential consumers - especially when dealing with major studios. Most non-developers' minds only have convention to draw from, so when a company seeks feedback most of the feedback they receive is to do what is conventional. "This game is like X, so make it more like X but add Y because X lacked it" does not help create diversity in video games, it creates homogenization. For mass market games this means the more companies seek input from the consumer to less diverse mainstream games will be. The more direct input the every man who has in game design, the more similarity between designs become.
The inverse is also true. The less game designers rely on the consumer the more unconventional game design can get. This may not inherently be a good thing as convention exists for a reason - but why not let them take risks? Well, there is a balancing act when it comes to budgeting and expected returns. This is the other large issue with the consumer relationship in the games business. Game development is expensive, and the cost needs to be spent making sure they make enough in return to keep running a business to keep making games. Obvious stuff is obvious, right? Well, as it turns out you (the consumer) actually have a say in what gets sold, and the sameyness of the modern AAA games market is partially your fault. While this issue exists in art mediums where major studios/artists don't take many risks there is always "the middle market" to strive for and sometimes big enough middle market arts achieve mainstream success. In recent years (2000s onward) we've seen the music industry fluctuate in a way that mainstream acts are making less money than they previously did and the middle market grew - while still super profitable Warner Music Group, Roadrunner, Sony BMG, etc have lost a pretty decent market share to previously smaller yet more adventurous labels like Metropolis and Nuclear Blast who have managed to grow enough to promote some acts enough to get radio play. How does this play into the video games conversation? This is what we as consumers should strive for. Even if video games are inherently different than music, growing the middle market is crucial for riskier games to achieve mainstream success. This means we should stop buying Football Updated [Insert Year], Brown FPS:The Slight Update, and Anime Fantasy 14-2 and be spending more money on indies. We need to grow the middle and let the AAA developers know what their failings are with our dollars. Instead of treating games like a goods service and demanding we have our burger made our way, we should instead let designers actually design games and buy into what interests us. That is really the only way we'll see ideas developed we might not have known we'd like.
Log in to comment